On Monday one of Germany’s most influential newspapers, Die Welt, announced that they were hiring Marina Ovsyannikova, the previous editor of Russian state Channel One that disrupted an online news program with an anti-war poster a couple of weeks earlier.
The press release praised her nerve as well as determination to safeguard journalistic principles.
Indeed, Ovsyannikova is the only staff member of the Russian state media that has actually dared to use her position to damage the state grip on details. She is also one of the few that has openly regretted having benefited years to “zombify” the population.
Her employment at Die Welt increases questions about the responsibility she bears for marketing Russian propaganda. This is especially sensitive provided the progressively unsafe and hard problems reporters in Russia’s independent media have actually been working under since Vladimir Putin involved power in 2000.
From practically the moment Vladimir Putin took office, he and also his group started to take down Russia’s independent media. First, the state took control of tv, beginning with a requisition of the prominent independent television network NTV, after that relocated to local tv terminals as well as papers, radio, and also national print media.
Over the last few years authorities began a mass campaign to identify reporters and media “international representatives.” Not just does this seem like “opponents of the people” in Russian, it suggested the constant risk of criminal and administrative prosecution. To avoid being fined or criminally prosecuted, “foreign representatives” needed to adhere to complicated and also challenging — including financially difficult — treatments designed by officials for seemingly no reason but to make their lives unpleasant.
Even worse, a media electrical outlet can be proclaimed actually “unfavorable” and also outlawed entirely. Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s activities and also the magazine Project came under this category.
As the marketplace for independent media in Russia obtained smaller, so did the wages. It was considered tacky to review cash; individuals– specifically regular staff members– were intended to be working “for the concept.” Yet it was such a large trouble that when the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel Prize, Svetlana Reiter, a reporter from the independent publication Meduza, asked if he would certainly increase the salaries of his personnel with the prize money. He really did not; he gave away the cash to charity rather.
Lots, otherwise hundreds, of reporters have actually run out job over the previous 18 months looking for chances in international media. We in Russia weren’t able to create an independent trade union of journalists to provide support in such situations; conditions simply really did not allow it.
The career of journalism in Russia is extremely dangerous. According to Reporters Without Borders, by 2020, 36 reporters have been killed throughout Putin’s presidency, as well as it is tough to count the number of attempts have been made on others’ lives, how many have been beaten or bugged.
This was brought home, terribly, 2 years ago when Nizhny Novgorod reporter Irina Slavina killed herself by self-immolation. “She was endlessly fined, she was denied of her resources, she was denied of her profession,” imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny stated. She left a suicide note saying, “Please blame the Russian Federation for my fatality.”
Quickly afterwards, the state began a brand-new, final, stage to subdue independent journalism.
In the first week of the war in Ukraine, the authorities shut down mostly all the remaining independent media in Russia. The net channel TVRain was suspended; the oldest independent radio station Ekho Moskvy was taken off the air and its website ruined; Novaya Gazeta stopped working up until the end of the war, as well as any Russian-language websites that were not under state control were blocked, even if they were not covering the war.
Parliament replacements quickly passed brand-new laws on armed forces censorship, where one of the most severe penalty of 15 years in prison is for so-called “fakes” concerning the army. “Fakes” are any report not based on ministry of defense news release.
It is not an excellent time for Russians to whine about their problems when individuals are dying every day in Ukraine. Under threat of jail time, hundreds of journalists left Russia within days. The substantial majority of them were not planned for this; several did not also have enough savings to get a ticket. When the Visa as well as Mastercard bank cards provided in Russia were obstructed abroad, they lost access to even the tiny sums they had in their accounts. A lot of international media electrical outlets with bureaus or reporters in Russia had some kind of emergency situation strategy as well as sources to assist their workers, however the Russian outlets had absolutely nothing.
Not everyone can leave the nation. Several journalists don’t have the methods, or they have relatives that rely on them. Remaining behind is unsafe, even for individuals that are not journalists. Pavel Zelensky, that helped Alexei Navalny’s media outlet, mosted likely to jail in 2015 even though he was a cameraman, not a journalist.
Marina Ovsyannikova as well as certainly Die Welt bear no blame for any one of the above. But if the journalists in Russia– and specifically in Ukraine– that have actually truly suffered under Putin’s program found her protest on air to be motivating, they likewise question if she was one of the most deserving prospect for the work.
