All reporters from Russian News Service have left the company to protest editorial policies which they describe as “censorship”. New managers of the news agency have banned any coverage for opposition movements, giving the air to members of the Kremlin-backed United Russia party and what they call “positive news”.
Artem Khan, a correspondent from Russian News Service, said Thursday he and all his colleagues have walked out because of “censorship” and “pressure” from the company’s new executives who took office in April.
Russian News Service, a subsidiary of the Russian Media Group holding, makes news for three major radio stations with total audience of about 8 million people.
New executives first employed their editorial policy in the coverage of the March of the Discontented in Moscow when riot police beat and arrested dozens of opposition activists. Artem Khan told Kommersant that Russian News Service’s new editor-in-chief Vsevolod Neroznak had not allowed his report about the rally crackdown to go on air. On May 1, all Russian News Service journalists were banned to cover a Communist rally in Moscow. Mr. Neroznak, who had come from the Kremlin-controlled First Channel television, told his staff: “They [Communists] don’t exist for us,” Artem Khan said, quoting his former boss.
Vsevolod Neroznak and the company’s new director general Alexander Shkolnik have ordered to give air to member of the United Russia party and Public Chamber, blacklisting all opposition leaders. They also asked to allocate at least 50 percent of news time for “positive news”.
Vsevolod Neroznak described in an interview with Kommersant the dismissal of his reporters as “a usual practice” and part of “a restructuring”.
Igor Yakovenko, head of the Russian Union of Journalists, compared developments at Russian News Service with purges on the German radio under Hitler in 1936 when officials also called for positive journalism and “joy and unity of the society.” “In Russia, freedom of speech and journalism also being trampled on under the same motto of positive news,” he said.
