>From JRL ---- Russia's independent TV channel stops broadcasting January 22, 2002 AFP Russia was left without a national independent television broadcaster for the first time in the post-Soviet era after TV-6 went off the air without warning at midnight, only to be replaced by a sports channel.
The station, which has frequently aired criticism of President Vladimir Putin's campaign in Chechnya and was financed by the controversial self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, served as home to many of the journalists who fled NTV, the private station that was taken over by the government amid great protest last year. The Kremlin had no immediate reaction to the development, which left a stunned audience watching a broadcast of tennis from Australia rather than the usual morning news. "We don't have a comment about this at the moment and I do not know whether we will have one later in the day," the Kremlin press service said. But a spokesman for the office of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told Interfax news agency that he did not think that free speech in Russia was an issue after the closure of TV-6. "What we simply have is the decision of a court being carried out, and there is no reason to talk about a change as far as freedom of speech in Russia is concerned," said Alexei Volin, the second deputy of the Russian government administration. The fate of Russian media under Putin has strained the Kremlin administration's relations with the West, but it became less of a point of contention following the start of the US-led anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan in early October. The employees of TV-6 "intend to fight until the end and fight for the right to work on a different station with the same team," TV-6 television news broadcaster Alexei Vorobyov told Moscow Echo radio. "I do not understand why we have been left standing in an information blockade." The TV-6 crew said that guards were still allowing them into the Ostankino building, a massive Soviet-era television center in northern Moscow. But the TV-6 office no longer had working phones or access to news wire services, its lights were turned off by the television center's management, and its broadcasting satellite was left without power. Russia's media ministry ordered the Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corporation (MNVK), which held the license for TV-6, to stop broadcasting as the liquidation order came into force in an unexpected ruling last week. The ruling followed a complicated law that expired at the end of last year allowing minority shareholders -- in this case the state-controlled oil giant LUKoil -- to demand that a company be declared bankrupt should it not meet a tangled formula that oversaw its assets and income. That federal court ruling overturned an earlier decision that would have allowed TV-6 to stay on air, and infuriated even those journalists who saw the private broadcaster as their main rivals. "This makes me sick. I don't know if one can force a blank screen on a television channel, but the very idea that someone would want to do that is simply foul," said Vladimir Pozner, a prominent journalist who works with the state-controlled ORT television. "I think that this is a unique incident, when a whole channel stops broadcasting. This violates the rights of their audiences, and this black hole is actually a hole in our democratic practice," complained Yasen Zasursky, dean of the journalism college in Moscow's State University. However, rights activist Alexei Simonov argued that authorities might try a different tack. "They will merely try to hang a few swords over their heads and make the team feel completely defenseless, so that they begin to do stupid things," Simonov said on Moscow Echo radio. The TV-6 team said they suspected the decision was the Kremlin's retaliation after rebel reporters fought the government over the independence of the national NTV broadcaster, and left NTV for TV-6 when they lost. The state-owned giant Gazprom had taken over NTV in April as Putin waged a war against Russia's so-called oligarchs, powerful businessmen whose fortunes were made in the unbridled free-for-all of perestroika. However, "(the Kremlin's war against) oligarchs is not important any more. It is we who are being destroyed," TV-6's show host Svetlana Sorokina said. The team would still compete for the broadcasting license, the company's director and TV-6 show host Yevgeny Kiselyov assured. Earlier, Media and Press Minister Mikhail Lesin said in a television interview that the TV-6 team's chances of winning the license were "very high." Last Tuesday, journalists at TV-6 parted ways with Berezovsky to form "OOO TV-6" in an effort to save the embattled station. ****** ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green Leninist-International list: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht
