MOSCOW -- The decades of President Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia have been unkind to the country’s independent media. Since Putin was first elected in 2000, the Kremlin has stifled independent national broadcasting, closed down or taken over other commercial media projects, exerted pressure on media owners and advertisers, pushed out foreign investors, and repeatedly blocked access to various nonstate Internet resources. And that is to say nothing about the unsolved killings of prominent journalists like Igor Domnikov, Yury Shchekochikhin, Paul Klebnikov, and Anna Politkovskaya. Meanwhile, the nation’s airwaves have been filled with a round-the-clock stream of Kremlin-directed propaganda and spin via a fistful of lavishly subsidized state television channels. The Kremlin’s hostility has hobbled major publications traditionally lauded for their hard-hitting investigative reporting, says Roman Dobrokhotov, editor in chief of The Insider website. He pointed to publications including Vedomosti, Forbes, and Kommersant. “And unexpectedly at that precise moment, completely new media appeared -- media of the new wave,” he said.
First, there was The Insider. But then a lot of others appeared. From The Bell to the various small media projects of Khodorkovsky. Meduza is somewhere in the middle between larger and smaller projects, but it is also part of the new wave where a new generation of journalists is working.” And all these new media, Dobrokhotov says, are emerging in “a supertoxic environment.” “Because of this, they are stronger,” he argues. “There are only two organized forces capable of resisting -- activists and journalists,” he said. “And they have found themselves in such a narrow common niche that it is often difficult to tell them apart. Navalny is now doing journalistic investigations that are sometimes better than those of major media. “If we have any hope of restoring a law-based state, it lies in these two forces somehow helping society to accumulate the energy needed to put this mechanism into reverse,” Dobrokhotov added. “Information is power -- particularly in the 21st century,” he concluded. “How does Putin manage? He simply deprives people of information, just doling it out in isolated bits as he deems necessary. It is up to us -- journalists and activists -- to resist this and to present more objective and accurate information.”
