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Letter from Moscow There’s a kind of creeping peacefulness to the Moscow spring, a pause after the invasions of Ostankino in October, the tumultuous post-election reorganizations of December and the threatened strikes of January. If anything, peace and the move toward cohesion has a kind of backward look to it. A draft set of regulations for the new Federal Radio and Television Service is circulating, and in it one can see the octopus of Gostelradio, a giant return to a Party style. It looks like all power will be focused in a single umbrella government agency: power to license, to register instruments of mass information, to enforce obligations in licenses, to go to court to remove the authority to broadcast. Aleksander Yakovlev is a respected man, and not power-hungry. But the structure has, within it, seeds of enormous control. Last month also saw the issuance of a Presidential decree on the classification of state secrets. What was breathtaking was the range of ministries authorized, on their own, to classify documents. Almost everyone except the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Social Welfare gained the power to withhold information. This order, single handedly, diminished progress made earlier in opening up government, in providing journalists with access to information. The draft is inconsistent with the existing Press Law. We are still holding our collective journalistic breath after the strenuous protests, in January, against spiraling prices for newsprint and the manufacturing of newspapers. The Prime Minister assured the Union of Journalists that the entire matter—a round of cost hikes that crippled the newspaper industry and would have doomed many papers—would be reconsidered. The situation, though, is still fairly tense. I have read the plaintive cry of a regional newspaper: either you are in lockstep with the government, and protected by it, or you are in the commercial embrace. Independence is hard to locate. For the struggling independent sector in broadcasting, the crisis is also great. The government ministry in charge of transmission of communications is relentless in obtaining a monopoly rent. In January, when Igor Malashenko and NTV were awarded a channel, I protested loudly as former chair of the Temporary Commission on Licensing. The proper procedures were not followed (not at all atypical). But faults in the process do not obliterate the fact that NTV is doing a pretty fine job. Their news is now the best in Moscow and brings the widest perspectives. So far, the Parliament is an unknown. Personally, I try to avoid it. The Speaker, Rybkin, is rising on a platform of peace and togetherness. We shall see what this means for the media. Aleksei
Simonov |
Last Updated: 11/20/99 |
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© 1999 Post-Soviet Media Law &
Policy Newsletter |
