Mick Hartley

It’s World Press Freedom Day. The Guardian’s CiF celebrate with, amongst other items, a piece by Russian journalist Tatina Lokshina:

Already this year, 24 journalists and five media assistants have been killed, 125 journalists and four media assistants imprisoned and 67 cyber dissidents have also been thrown into jail across the world, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Last year saw a record number of journalists killed and imprisoned. Among the victims was my courageous compatriot, Anna Politkovskaya, the award-winning journalist and human rights champion who dared to speak the truth about the war in Chechnya. After her brutal murder last autumn, the small community of Russian independent journalists and human rights defenders realised how utterly vulnerable they all are.

On March 2 this year, another Russian journalist, Ivan Safronov, a military affairs correspondent for an independent daily Kommersant died in Moscow. He fell from a window of his apartment building and his colleagues believe it was a murder masked as a suicide. If their suspicions are confirmed Safronov’s name will be added to the list of 13 Russian journalists killed for work-related reasons since the year 2000, when Vladimir Putin became president. Not a single one of those contract-style murders has been properly investigated. […]

Independent press in Russia is becoming a rarity. Television has fully transformed into a mouthpiece of Kremlin’s propaganda. Recently, Russian Internews, a media capacity-building organisation whose work has been largely focused on training regional and local TV journalists, had its office raided and its servers seized in connection with a dubious criminal case against the head of the group.

The Committee to Protect Journalists includes Russia as one of the worst backsliders on press freedom. But, back at CiF, the familiar voices hold sway. By the third comment, Lokshina is accused of being a “professional pro-western zealot”. [The first two comments weren’t exactly complimentary.] In comment #4, we learn – as we surely knew we would – that things are as bad if not worse in the West, where Bush is “an enthusiastic killer of journalists”. Yes, it’s CiF business as usual.

Good to see Steve Bell continuing his rich vein of smug predictability telling-truth-to-power, by the way. Blair’s last days as a reprise of Hitler in his bunker: what genius!