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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

The Press is the First to Die

6 October, 1998 - 00:00

Reports of Russian newspapers shutting down and television and radio
companies downsizing their staff come in on a daily basis. Today, the bankrupt
oligarchs do not seem to care much for those whom they hired to work and
promised lots of money. Colleagues are in no hurry to express sympathy
either. I remember when Pravda newspaper was suspended for some
time back in August 1991, and we, the young Nezavisimaya Gazeta team,
confident in the priority of the freedom of the press, wrote a long letter
in defense of our colleagues. Where has this kind of nobility gone? The
newspapers that still remain open are busy counting the former enormous
salaries of the closed The Russian Telegraph's journalists and figuring
out whether they really needed the office cellular phones they had. Virtually
nobody is mentioning the fact that Izvestiya and The Russian Telegraph
are merging not for professional reasons (one of which could be that the
two periodicals logically supplement each other), but only because they
both are part of the same Oneksim holding. And if Novye Izvestiya
and Nezavisimaya Gazeta should also merge, it will happen only on
Borys Berezovsky's whim.

Different periodicals, different editorial staffs, different models
and readerships...  The Russian press is one of the first to fall
victim to the collapse of the society that it liked so much, the society
where a clan economy and clan politics were serviced by a clan press and 
where, unfortunately, nothing real has been built. I do not mean to defend
anyone, but, in my view, the journalists still were the last to accept
those rules of the game - signs of honesty could be observed in the Russian
press up until the presidential election. Now journalists are one of the
first to suffer. Although, perhaps this sad experience will make at least
someone in Russia realize that, after all, an economically free and politically
independent press is not really such a bad thing to have.

 

 

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