Rising censorship among world's oil powers
Venezuela's move to shut down a major TV station parallels recent crackdowns in Iran and Russia.
from the May 24, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Russia: A Top 10 'free-speech backslider'
Instances of media crackdowns are spurred by local contexts but are part of a growing repression of various forms of public dissent, including nongovernmental organizations. In Russia last week, local authorities took steps they apparently believed would limit the public relations damage to an EU-Russia summit in Samara: police arrested organizers of a protest by the opposition "Other Russia" movement as well as journalists who had been trying to interview them. They also raided the Samara offices of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, seizing computers and blocking publication of the paper's Monday edition. While those arrested were quickly released, it was a reminder of wider official crackdowns on Russia's few remaining independent journalistic voices.
But likely to get more attention here at Monday's World Congress of Journalists is the announced eviction of Russia's 100,000-member journalists' union from its offices to make way for the state-funded RIA-Novosti's English cable news network, Russia Today.
"Today the electronic media is mostly in the hands of the state. From the pluralism of the 1990s, we have arrived at near-complete uniformity," says Mikhail Melnikov, an analyst with the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, an independent NGO. "The only thing demanded of journalists is loyalty to the authorities. The zone of criticism has become so narrow that the population is no longer in a position to understand what's going on in the country."
The Washington-based Freedom House reported earlier this month that Russia fell six places, to the 165th spot, in the group's annual rankings of political freedom. The report noted that although Russia's constitution provides for press freedom, "authorities are able to use the legislative and judicial systems to harass and prosecute independent journalists." The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists concurred, identifying Russia last week as one of 10 top "backsliders" on press freedoms.
Moises Naim, the editor and publisher of Foreign Policy magazine, says that such press censorship has evolved from a "heavy hand of the state that directly takes over operations" to a more indirect form, he says, that often takes the shape of scrutiny by tax authorities or by economic boycotts. Last year, his magazine published "The First Law of Petropolitics," an article by Thomas Friedman, positing that "the price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states." But he says that press censorship is not restricted to oil-rich nations – that repression is as intense in Argentina as it is in Venezuela, for example.
Still, Christopher Walker at Freedom House, says that the stakes are raised in states such as Russia or Iran, with weak institutions, when there are booms in energy cycles. "It gives regimes that are not inclined to play by the rules the resources to have a freer hand," he says. "It opens the doors for authorities and other power holders to steal resources."
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