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OTHER
MEDIA NEWS
I. Risque
Pop Video Banned by MTV.
By Alex Bratersky
Positioning
itself as the arbiter of good taste in music videos, MTV
Russia has banned a controversial video by one of the
most popular Russian bands because, the company spokesman
said, “It violates all the taboos.”
“Our
position is simple and it was many times made
public: We don’t charge any money from artists
[to show their videos], but we have tough rules, which
may be called censorship,” MTV Russia spokesman
Andrei Afanasyev said.
The decision,
which was made about two weeks ago, concerned the video
for the song “Ty Brosil Menya,” or “You
Dumped Me,” by the group Strelki, or Arrows, one of
the several Russian all-female groups modeled after the
British group Spice Girls.
“It [the
decision] is not linked with this particular group.
It is concerned only with the theme of the song,”
Afanasyev said.
The video, which
is shown by the music video program “DISC
Channel” and was the subject of “Skandal
Nedeli,” or “Scandal of the Week,” on TV-6
on Thursday, tells the story of a young girl who falls in
love with an older man, who then leaves her.
“You dumped
me, you dumped me, when you left, I was alone. You
told me that you don’t need me,” goes the
song’s chorus.
The video
graphically shows a girl—played by a model, not a
member of Strelki—using drugs and having sex with
her partner, played by the prominent Soviet actor,
Latvian-born Ivars Kalnins, and then shooting him dead as
he emerges from a casino with his new girlfriend.
Afanasyev said
the graphic sex, violence and images of drug use led to
the decision to ban the video. He added it was the
first such ban since MTV Russia started broadcasting in
the fall.
Strelki producers
were not available for comment, but Moskovsky Komsomolets
quoted an anonymous Strelki spokesman who said the
decision to ban the video was made personally by MTV
Russia director Boris Zosimov. The spokesman said
he saw Zosimov’s decision as an unfair one, adding
that the video “Smack My Bitch Up” by Prodigy,
which depicts drug use, has been shown many times on MTV
Russia.
“It seems
that officials of MTV always notice faults in others, but
rarely notice their own,” the newspaper quoted him
as saying.
Afanasyev said
the video by Prodigy, as well as a controversial video by
the popular band Splin that shows a man throwing a baby
carriage off a cliff, have been shown only at night and
the questionable parts have been blacked out.
He said such
limitations would not have worked with the Strelki video.
“We could
have done that, but then nothing would have remained of
the video.
They put
everything in there drugs, weapons and nudity.”
Music critic
Artyom Troit-sky said censorship of music videos happens
quite often on Russian television. Troitsky used to
have his own music program, “Oblomov’s
Cafe,” where he often showed videos that other
television companies refused to air.
“I am
against censorship in any case, but in Russia it is
mostly used to settle accounts,” Troitsky
said. “I can’t rule out that Zosimov had
a conflict [with Strelki].”
Strelki, which
has achieved huge popularity among teenagers for their
simple hits “New Russian Girls” and “At
the Party,” gained a boost in popularity when the
group posed for the Russian version of Playboy last year.
The group was
formed by a competition announced on the late-night
variety show “Znak Kachestva” in which 4,000
young women took part. Like many similar groups,
Strelki do not sing, but lip-synch their songs at their
concerts.
The Moscow Times,
February 3, 1999
II. US funds
for Russian press seen as “interference.”
The statement on
the allocation of 10m dollars to the Russian free press,
made by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during
her working visit to Moscow, is “gross interference
by the United States in Russia’s internal
affairs.” This was the statement made [on 28th
January] at the State Duma plenary session on behalf of
the CPRF [Communist Party of the Russian Federation]
faction by Deputy Rinat Gabidullin.
In his words,
such a statement is particularly intolerable “in the
run-up to the State Duma and Russian Federation
presidential elections which will determine Russia’s
future.” “He who pays the piper calls the
tune,” the Communist deputy considers.
In this
connection Rinat Gabidullin called on the representatives
of the United States, “the cradle of democracy and
freedom, to distribute their dollars among the free press
in an open manner so that the Russian people can see
which organs of the mass media are now funded by the
transatlantic power and properly assess those political
movements and politicians which are supported by those
organs.”
‘Sovetskaya
Rossiya,’ Moscow, January 28, 1999
III. Bid to
license foreign radios not “political.”
The Federal
Service for TV and Radio never pursued political goals,
when it urged some radio stations to obtain broadcasting
licences prior to 21st February, the department’s
head, Mikhail Seslavinskiy, said [on 27th January].
[Seslavinskiy] We have absolutely no complaints as
regards the content of the programmes they are
broadcasting. We simply do not monitor the
content of such programmes. I would like to
reiterate that no political agenda was being pursued. . .
.
At the same time,
our legislation is in line with international laws and in
line with the existing conventions on television and
radio broadcasting.
[Presenter]
Let me
remind you that unless radio stations, including the
Voice of America, the BBC, Radio Slavyanka and many
others, obtain licences, their broadcasting will be
stopped.
Ekho Moskvy radio,
Moscow, January 27, 1999
IV. US
cushions Russian media against hard times.
The US promised
$10 million on Monday to help the independent media in
Russia survive hard times and promote pluralist
values. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
announced the promise in a speech to civil society
activists at Moscow’s All-Russia State Library for
Foreign Literature.
The amount, which
is available for spending in 1999, is four times what the
United States gave the Russian media in 1998, State
Department spokesman James Rubin said.
‘’Many journalists are losing money because
advertising revenues have dropped, so we’re trying
to help them survive the current climate,’’ he
said.
Some of the money
will go on technical assistance to teach business methods
to newspapers and other media organisations, some on
stipends for journalists who have lost their jobs and
some to buy printing presses, he said.
‘’We’re trying to cushion the independent
media from being reduced because of the bad business
climate,’’ he added.
The $10 million
is part of a US aid package for all aspects of
‘’civil society’’ in Russia,
including programmes to support non-governmental
organisations, legal reforms, education and pluralism.
Russian Today, 27
January 1999
V. Foreign
radio may be barred from broadcasting in Russia.
Several Western
radio stations may be barred from relaying their
programmes in Russia by the state broadcasting service
FSTR because they have no license, Itar-Tass news agency
reported Monday.
They include
Radio France Internationale, the BBC, Deutsche Welle,
Voice of America, Radio Sweden and Radio Netherlands,
which use state-owned equipment to relay their services
across the country.
The agency quoted
FSTR head Mikhail Seslavinsky as saying that the stations
concerned had until February 20 to regularise their
position or face a ban.
Seslavinsky said
the threatened sanctions had nothing to do with the
provenance of the radio stations or the material they
were broadcasting.
Russian Today, 27
January 1999
VI. Moscow
aims for nationwide TV channel.
At the end of
last year, that is, on the eve of the very beginning of
the active presidential campaign, the Moscow government
obtained technical capabilities for creating an
all-Russian cable television channel. The
joint-stock company Sistema Telekom, sister company of
the holding company AFK Sistems, which is closely
connected with the Moscow government, concluded a lease
agreement on satellite TV channels. The broadcasts
will cover the entire territory of Russia, excluding
Kamchatka. . . .
Some eight
broadcast antennas leased by Sistema provide an
opportunity to broadcast approximately 40 TV channels
that will be leased out to Russian or foreign television
companies.
The satellite
signal will be received by regional stations and TV
companies and then retransmitted to the end-users through
cable channels. Paid television usually uses such
an infrastructure.
However, it
is possible that the profits from pay channels (real or
anticipated) and maybe political necessity will allow the
broadcast of several free channels over the entire
territory of Russia. . . .
The holding
company Media-Most which owns the NTV channel was the
frontrunner in using space-based technologies for the
needs of nongovernment television.
After launching
the direct TV broadcast satellite Bonum-1 (the project
cost 145m dollars), the Media-Most holding company’s
head, Vladimir Gusinskiy, and his first deputy Igor
Malashenko proudly declared that a broadcast system fully
independent of the state had been created in Russia for
the first time. Media-Most built a station on
Sokolovskoye highway [Moscow] for transmitting signals to
the satellite.
The station
transmits a programme package compiled by the owners to
Bonum-1, from where the package is retransmitted to
subscribers of NTV-Plus. In digital, not analogue,
format. State resources are not used in the network
at all. Malashenko was pleased to note:
“The state has nothing to do with it.”
However, the
state has no intention of surrendering its broadcasting
monopoly to certain politicians and business
people. The director of the State Centre for Radio
and TV Broadcasting [GTsRT] Ostankino, Vyacheslav
Misyulin, noted in an interview with
‘Izvestiya’ that he is not experiencing any
competition as yet. He is convinced that there will
be few viewers in Russia who are capable of installing
satellite dishes and paying considerable fees to receive
TV programmes.
At the same time,
Mr Misyulin emphasizes the efforts by nongovernment
broadcasters to broaden their satellite TV broadcast
coverage in order to secure themselves in case of
possible disconnection. The GTsRT head noted:
“Everybody wants their hands to be free.”
The GTsRT is preparing a response to the space demarche
by the media moguls. Old analogue transmitters are
being replaced by digital transmitters in the Ostankino
tower. . . .
Intersputnik was
established in 1971 by an international nongovernment
association that comprises organizations from 23
countries. Some 16 of its 44 channels provide TV
transmissions and 28 channels can be used for
telecommunications. Russian long-distance
telecommunications provider Rostelekom corporation will
use 25 channels.
‘Izvestiya’
web site, Moscow, January 22, 1999
VII. State
Needs Up to $3Bln to Fight 2000 Bug.
By Kirill Koriukiri
Russia will need
$1.5 billion to $3 billion to protect itself from the
Year 2000 computer bug, and the money is not there, a
senior official has said.
The implication
is that some of Russia’s nuclear missiles could take
off next New Year’s Eve if something is not done
quickly, some computer experts say.
State
Communications Committee chairman Alexander Krupnov was
quoted by Itar-Tass as saying that equipment and software
used by many state agencies, most alarmingly the
military, was not ready for midnight, Dec. 31.
When the clock
strikes 12, old computer systems, programmed to use only
the last two digits of a year, will start interpreting
2000 as 1900. The H-hour is 347 days from Monday.
“We have to
admit that not all agencies have achieved positive
results in their work [on the bug],” Krupnov said.
“Such
structures as the Defense Ministry have significant
difficulties as regards all types of missiles.”
Krupnov said
Russia’s missile forces use 20-year-old technology
and it is impossible to upgrade the equipment since the
companies that produced it are already defunct.
Besides, the government has no money to finance upgrades,
and all government agencies will be left to their own
devices when it comes to coping with the 2000 bug, he
added.
State agencies
Monday denied that they were unprepared to fight the bug.
Vyacheslav Davipenko, a spokesman for the Strategic
Missile Forces, said the bug “is not a problem for
us.” “We constantly update all the
systems: The missiles may be 20 years old, but new
equipment has been installed,” he said.
The Defense Ministry said earlier that not all of
its systems needed an upgrade but those that did would
require millions of rubies in additional subsidies.
Industry sources
said Monday the Defense Ministry would not allow outside
experts to check its systems for the 2000 bug, and it is
possible that the problem exists on some levels untapped
by the military’s own programmers.
“It’s
impossible to set a diagnosis without running a checkup
on the patient,” said Sergei Michailov, deputy
director of KIB computer company, which has repeatedly
tried to alert the government to the bug issue and which
administers a Russian 2000 bug site on the Internet,
www.year2000.ru.
Vladimir Belyayev, director of the IT department at
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, said Russia’s missile
technology was old and susceptible to the millennium bug,
and it was impossible to determine how serious the
problem was.
“Who knows
if it would be possible to launch a missile [after 1999],
or if it will launch itself,” he said.
The best way out
for bodies like the Defense Ministry would be to
commission FAPSI, the government communications agency,
to test its equipment, but no such tests have been
ordered so far, Belyayev said.
A Defense
Ministry source was quoted by Interfax on Monday as
saying that a group of experts from the Pentagon would
come to Moscow in early February to help deal with the
bug.
Belyayev says
missile technology is difficult to upgrade, since it is
largely hardware-based, with the bug lodged in wire
circuits, not in lines of software COClC.
Even in civilian
government departments, getting rid of the bug is going
to be costly, and the money is hard to come by.
Yury Golovanov, head of the technical department of the
State Statistics Committee, said his group started
working on the 2000 problem last year, getting rid of
Soviet-era computers and installing Pentium-based local
area networks. But software upgrades are still
going on, and even without the price of the new equipment
the debugging bill will run to a minimum of $3 million.
Golovanov
admitted that Goskomstat’s inability to purchase
enough new equipment made the bug a problem, and the
committee may have to “fish out” mistakes that
may occur in government statistics after 1999.
Goskomstat will prepare a report on its readiness for the
2000 bug by September, Golovanov said.
Despite the
existing problems, Krupnov’s $3 billion estimate of
total costs of solving the bug problem is on the high
side, Belyayev said.
Earlier this year, Krupnov said $500 million would
be enough to solve the problem throughout Russia.
The State Communications Committee could not provide a
breakdown of the $3 billion figure Monday.
The State Duma is
scheduled to consider the second reading of the 1999
federal budget Tuesday. The draft budget allocates
just 9.7 billion rubies to health careless than half of
Krupnov’s high estimate of 2000 bug costs.
The Moscow Times,
January 19, 1999
VIII. BBC
said to be operating illegally in Moscow.
It has transpired
that the BBC, the world’s largest radio authority,
is giving us its news illegally. This news surfaced
[on 15th January] at a conference held by the senior
managers of Moscow’s radio stations, the Russian
Federal Service for Television and Radio Broadcasting,
and the State Committee for Communications and
Information Technology.
Albert Rakovskiy,
chief of the administration at the State Inspectorate for
Television and Radio Broadcasting, stated that eight
radio stations are broadcasting on Moscow’s airwaves
illegally. In addition to the BBC, these are
Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale, Islamic
Wave, the Christian Church Social Channel, and the radio
stations Govorit Moskva, Slavyanka and Radio Sport.
Mikhail
Seslavinskiy, head of the Federal Service for Television
and Radio Broadcasting, added that he was prepared to
tolerate this situation until 1st February and that all
the radio broadcasters had a “legal
dispensation” for this period.
What has
happened? Yuriy Fedutinov, general director of Ekho
Moskvy radio, commented on the situation thus:
“The radio broadcasting centres are turning a blind
eye to certain discrepancies with the law. They
receive hard cash for their work. Furthermore, the
foreigners lease mainly mediumwave and Russia’s
so-called shortwave frequencies, where there is virtually
no competition because the sound quality of those
frequencies is of little interest to advertisers.
This is why it is mainly budget-funded companies,
including foreign ones, that can afford this
waveband. The real reason for the scandal is the
‘unofficial distribution’ of the most
commercial waveband—FM—that has started.”
Govorit Moskva
and Radio Sport began broadcasting on these attractive
frequencies without proper registration. The former
Prestizh Radio gave up its frequency for Radio NSN, which
certainly did not register its licence immediately.
But after registering its licence, NSN was swallowed up
by Nashe Radio (the brainchild of [Russian media tycoon
Boris] Berezovskiy and Rupert Murdoch) which broadcasts
under its old licence. It is illegal to hand
licences over.
Savik Shuster,
director of the Moscow editorial office of the Svoboda
radio station, told us that it is not very difficult to
obtain a licence, which costs “peanuts.”
Radio Svoboda has been registered as a noncommercial
organization for this purpose. Nevertheless,
Shuster believes, it is no wonder that several
international broadcasters have encountered problems with
licences. The fact is that there is still no normal
legal area for their work in Russia.
It is hard to
imagine that the BBC or Deutsche Welle will be denied the
opportunity to broadcast in Russia because of this whole
licence episode. The Federal Service for Television
and Radio Broadcasting has no real levers for this.
According to ‘Segodnya’s’ information,
they have even discussed the possibility of using the old
Soviet radio jamming devices. But this is a costly
business: Mikhail Gorbachev stopped radio jamming
and saved the country 320m dollars a year. A
licence costs 50 times the minimum wage for our
broadcasters and 1000 times the minimum wage for the
corporate bodies formed with foreign participation.
‘Segodnya,’
Moscow, January 16, 1999
IX. Yeltsin
said to be against media censorship.
[Interviewer]
Our studio guest
[on 14th January] is Yeltsin’s press secretary,
Dmitriy Yakushkin, Good evening.
[Yakushkin]
Good evening. . .
.
[Q]
Russian
Press Day has been celebrated. In connection with
this a new attack has been observed, first and foremost
on the electronic media. We know that again the
leftist majority in parliament demanded from the
government the introduction of monitoring councils in the
electronic media, in national TV companies, in exchange
for the passing of the budget in the second
reading. Our colleagues in the newspapers are in a
difficult situation because the State Duma did not
approve a law on [tax] concessions. What is the
president’s position?
[A]
The
position of the president remains unchanged. There
must be no interference in the activity of the
media. Wherever he is able to make his voice heard,
he will do so, whether it is regarding financial
assistance or political assistance. There should
not and cannot be a return to censorship. Not in
any form, even the most civilized. This is the
president’s position.
[Q]
The
president gave awards to a large group of journalists but
as yet the so-called yearly presidential prize has not
been awarded. What is the situation regarding that?
[A]
This is
not the president’s fault. You know that this
is the president’s prize, but he awards it according
to representations by the Free Press Academy, which is
made up of about 20 heads of leading newspapers. It
is up to the editors of these newspapers. They all
have to choose a candidate for this prize. In fact
there are three prizes. There are two prizes for
young journalists just starting out, and a decision has
been taken on these two. As regards the first main
prize, I think it will take place in the next few days
because all chief editors should [words indistinct] The
president is supposed to take into account the opinions
of all the members of the academy. It turned out
that because of the holiday they could not all be present
and take part in the vote.
Ekho Moskvy radio,
Moscow, January 14, 1999
X. New TV,
radio transmission tariffs postponed.
The government of
Russia has postponed for a year the introduction of
unified tariffs on the transmission of programs of all
kinds of television and radio companies. A
resolution to the effect was signed by Prime Minister
Yevgeny Primakov on [10th January], sources at the
Governmental Information Department told ITAR-TASS.
The tariffs
differing in various regions were expected to become
valid on January 1, 1999. However, the government
took into account the grave financial position of
television and radio companies and resolved that the new
tariffs would only increase their debt.
Thus, the new
tariffs will enter into force on 1st January 2000.
ITAR-TASS news agency
(World Service), Moscow, January 10, 1999
XI. Serious funding
problems at Centre TV.
[Presenter]
Centre
TV channel is in difficulties, and the Moscow city
authorities are trying to determine its future. The
funding that the channel gets from the city budget is
one-fifth of what it actually needs to operate.
The head of the Moscow city duma’s [local
parliament] budget committee, (?Oleg Muzirin), said that
unless further funding is provided, the TV channel might
have to reduce its broadcasting, and that could lead to
the withdrawal of its licence.
[Muzirin]
The way
the matter stands now is whether Centre TV will or will
not survive.
The current
structure and balance of this TV channel means that the
allocation of budget funds to the tune of 324m roubles
will not seriously change matters and the channel could
be declared bankrupt.
This is because
the channel has running debts to the tune of 22m
dollars. That is because it must pay Moscow
city’s currency reserves 14m dollars, which hitherto
was provided as direct budget funding, and subsequently
transferred into credit resources [sentence as received].
The channel needs
over 60m dollars to work normally. The commercial
projects which could provide funds—advertising, an
exchange of films and programmes—do not reach the
necessary levels; they provide only 12m dollars in
income.
[Presenter]
The city
duma will shortly submit to Moscow Mayor Yuriy Luzhkov
its proposals for ways of resolving the matter.
Ekho Moskvy radio,
Moscow, December 28, 1998
XII. Yeltsin
pledges support and aid for TV companies.
President Boris
Yeltsin received managers of the VGTRK [All-Russian State
Television and Radio Broadcasting Company], ORT [Russian
Public TV] and NTV [Independent Television] television
companies, Russia’s leading, to promise them
“political and moral support.” Always
attentive to the mass media, the president referred to
them in several of his public addresses this year, too.
Many political
parties and movements are out for television
censorship. They got a rebuff [on24th December] as
President Yeltsin firmly spoke against mass media
“censorship, intimidation and persecution for
criticisms.” Mr Yeltsin proposed to invent new
patterns of contacts between the president and the
television so as to increase the effect of its federal
support. In dramatic words, he spoke of his
treatment of the television managers on a par with the
defence and interior ministers and the security chief as
“representatives of a fourth power branch.”
“You are to
know that you enjoy the president’s support, and are
entitled to presidential guarantees,” which spread
to all mass media with an official status, he
reassured. President Yeltsin described this year as
very hard for Russia and its television—especially
with insufficient aid it was getting from the federal top
as the TV purse was lean and it had formidable
broadcasting problems.
ORT first in line for help
ORT company
(national channel one) must be the first for government
allocations as it is on the brink of ruination with a
hundred million [presumably dollars] debt. Its
property was distrained by district court bailiffs [on]
18th November, and the company was about to interrupt
broadcasting. It had a hair’s breadth escape
as the cabinet gathered for an emergency session two days
later to suspend the distraint. Igor Shabdurasulov,
[ORT] company general director, responded with an open
letter to President Yeltsin to trace the problem to the
federal presidential race taking start. In fact,
the company needs protection from legal and financial
hoodlumism, rather than money donations, he
stressed. A month after the distraint started, the
city arbitration court dismissed ORT bankruptcy
proceedings, opened early December.
Now President
Yeltsin has drafted a decree for a credit line with
government and privately-held ORT stock to be
mortgaged. The motion will get the company out of
its dire straits, Mr Shabdurasulov said after the
conference [on 24th]. The decree has not been
signed yet, he pointed out. As they conferred [on
24th], Mr Yeltsin said that before loaning money to the
company, he was to know credit terms, guarantees and
spending patterns. “He was quite
correct,” remarked the TV boss [Shabdurasulov].
The president
paid great attention to a proposal to cut the
government-held block of ORT shares, with respective
amendments of the company charter. The presidential
staff and ORT managers must join hands to make blueprints
for the arrangement, said Mr Yeltsin. Igor
Shabdurasulov is not sure that the proposal will be
accepted, and thinks that presidential officers, the
cabinet or the State Duma may eventually bury it.
Anyway, the ORT sees a ray of hope, with control stock in
government hands.
VGTRK may get help later
The VGTRK
company, running RTR [Russia TV] and Kultura television
channels, is entirely owned by the government, but can
hope for aid only later, a prominent Kremlin functionary
said to RIA Novosti. This company, too, is barely
keeping the wolf from the door, with federal allocations
covering a mere 22 per cent of its total
expenditures—not enough even to pay to communication
companies, Mikhail Shvydkoi, company general director,
said in a Novosti interview. Contracts for
commercials, which bring 78 per cent of revenues, are
shrinking apace. The advertising market is in ruins
to cut company profits by 90 per cent, he complained.
The conferees
discussed with President Boris Yeltsin burning problems
they shared—mainly skyrocketing broadcasting fees,
Oleg Dobrodeyev, general director of the NTV independent
company, said to the press.
President Yeltsin
is well aware of Russian media predicaments, and willing
to help. [The 24th December] conference proved it
once again.
RIA news agency,
Moscow, December 24, 1998
XIII. Media
said to get generous funding in 1999.
The Russian
government intends to render serious financial support to
the Russian mass media bodies in 1999. This is seen
from the draft federal budget for 1999.
As a whole, the
state financial support of the mass media bodies are
defined in the amount of 1,786,700,000 roubles.
This sum includes the expenditures on supporting state TV
and radio companies, as well as publishing houses and
periodicals.
The allocations
for the needs of the Russian Federal Service for
Television and Radio Broadcasting are to amount to
1,545,900,000 roubles. The allocations for
periodicals and the publishing activity for 1999 are
defined by the draft federal budget in the sum of 83.3m
roubles.
The expenditures
on television and radio broadcasting of the State Duma
are to equal 16.9m roubles.
ITAR-TASS news agency
(World Service), Moscow, December 21, 1998
XIV. Speaker
plays down Duma threat to TV journalists.
“At the
moment, nobody is going to strip journalists of their
accreditation,” the speaker of the State Duma,
Gennadiy Seleznev, told parliamentary correspondents [on
16th December]. He was commenting on reports that
the State Duma has instructed its Committee on
Information Policy and Communications and the Duma’s
press service to decide the question of removing the
accreditation of journalists from the three leading TV
companies for their coverage of [the 15th December]
session of the commission on impeachment of the
president. “This does not strip them of
accreditation. At the moment, this is simply an
instruction to the committee to investigate this question
together with the press service,” the Duma speaker
said.
At the same time,
Gennadiy Seleznev expressed dissatisfaction with the way
the media sometimes cover the activities of both the
government and parliament.
[On the 16th,
Interfax reported Russia’s Communist Party had
called for the expulsion of several TV journalists from
the Duma over “biased reporting.” A
member of the Duma’s Communist faction, Tatyana
Astrakhankina, accused journalists from several TV
channels of putting out reports aimed at discrediting
Chairman of the Duma Committee on Security Viktor
Ilyukhin. She demanded that the journalists be
stripped of their accreditation to parliament.]
ITAR-TASS news agency
(World Service), Moscow, December 16, 1998
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