Share this story!            

Russians protest against govt media stranglehold

MOSCOW: A thousand people protested in Moscow on Sunday against the government’s clampdown on independent media, five years after the Kremlin effectively took control of private channel NTV.

The protestors, who included well-known television reporters who have lost their jobs, brandished placards reading “Today censorship, tomorrow dictatorship” and “Down with Kremlin-TV”.

“I have had enough of the lies on television. The government thinks it is king and we are its slaves,” Vera Valkovskaia, a housewife holding her small son on her shoulders, told AFP.

“I have lived in the Soviet Union, but this is enough, I don’t want to anymore,” she added.

Viktor Chenderovitch, a writer and former NTV presenter, said “Russia has changed a lot” since the oil giant Gazprom, in which the Russian government is the main shareholder, bought NTV in 2001. “I hope that the Russian flag will once again symbolise a democratic country and not a KGB colonel,” he said, referring to President Vladimir Putin’s former role in the secret service. He said the state’s stranglehold on television was preventing the emergence of a strong opposition and an independent justice system. A former presenter at Ren-TV who was fired after complaining about censorship at the channel, said television news channels had become government mouthpieces. afp

Home | Foreign

Share this story!