[FPSPACE] Kremlin Tightens Control of Russian News Media

[james oberg]

San Francisco Chronicle
June 3, 2004
Kremlin's wishes TV newsman fired after reporting on murdered Chechen
By Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer

Moscow -- Leonid Parfyonov was one of Russian television's most 
recognizable faces, his week in review show one of his network's biggest 
hits. But after the veteran television anchor broke the golden rule of 
Russia's state-run journalism by reporting on a politically explosive 
murder trial, he became the poster boy for the difficulties reporters face 
trying to report the news in President Vladimir Putin's managed democracy.

On Wednesday, Parfyonov was fired from Russia's state-run NTV television 
after he flouted the Kremlin's unwritten gag order to keep mum on the trial 
of two Russian officers in the murder of a Chechen rebel, and then 
criticized the channel after his former bosses pulled the controversial 
five-minute segment off the air after it had been broadcast in the far-east 
region, but before it was shown in Moscow. NTV management said in a 
statement that he violated his labor agreement that "obliged him to support 
the policies of the television company's leadership."

Parfyonov's story is an unsettling reminder of the difficult balancing act 
journalists working for Russia's state-controlled media have to play as 
they navigate between what they believe is their journalistic duty and what 
the Kremlin wants them to do.

Putin says Russia should have a "genuinely free" mass media, but since he 
came to power, he has been meticulously silencing his critics. Under his 
rule, the Kremlin has annexed all national television channels, making some 
topics - - such as Moscow's bloody, 10-year-old campaign in the separatist 
republic of Chechnya -- virtually off-limits for journalists.

At the same time, uncensored reports of what Putin says and does dominate 
state-run television news broadcasts in a style reminiscent of the Soviet 
era, and Putin, like some Politburo leader from those times, sometimes 
encourages journalists to report about certain events.

Last month, Putin said he hoped journalists would "give proper coverage" to 
the economic union aimed at boosting trade between Russia and the former 
Soviet republics of Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Parfyonov's dismissal Wednesday showed that no one, not even prominent 
journalists, is immune to punishment for daring to violate the unwritten 
rules by which all state-controlled media operate under Putin, critics said.

"We news people understand that this serious attack is also a warning to 
us," Elena Savina, an NTV journalist, told the Newsru.com news Web site.

Parfyonov tried to broadcast an interview with Malika Yandarbiyev, widow of 
Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a Chechen rebel leader who died in a car bombing in 
Qatar in February. The slaying of Yandarbiyev is particularly sensitive 
because two Russian security officers are on trial in Qatar for his murder.

In the interview, which is available online in Russian at www.newsru.com, 
Malika mostly talks about her grief, her children and the hospitality 
Qatar's government offered to Yandarbiyev, who fled Chechnya in 1999.

Parfyonov and his former boss, NTV Deputy Director Alexander Gerasimov, say 
they had received a verbal instruction from the Kremlin to avoid any 
commentary on this politically sensitive case. "The request came from 
people on a level that you don't argue with," Parfyonov told the Kommersant 
newspaper.

This was not the first time Parfyonov came under fire for defying the 
Kremlin line. In November, the NTV director, Nikolai Senkevich, reprimanded 
Parfyonov for trying to broadcast an interview with Yelena Tregubova, a 
former Kremlin journalist whose tell-all memoirs portrayed Putin's handlers 
as venal and shallow mandarins intent on keeping all news about the Kremlin 
out of the media.

Senkevich refused to allow the Tregubova interview to air.

"Censorship on state-run channels ... is so active that there is no need 
for a censorship committee," Alexei Simonov, chairman of the Glasnost 
Defense Foundation, told Ekho Moskvy radio. "The journalists' managers -- 
heads of channels and programs -- have taken on the role of censors."

After NTV banned the Yandarbiyev report from Qatar, Parfyonov lashed out at 
the Kremlin's tight control of the network's coverage.

"Stop teaching us how to love our motherland. I've been a professional 
journalist for 25 years and for 25 years I've been hearing: 'It's not time 
yet, buddy, it's not time yet,' " Parfyonov told the newspaper Izvestiya on 
Monday. "... It is time to realize that information is precious."
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