The Press is the First to Die

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.