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Moscow Times
May 20, 2004
Bill Expands State's Control of Media
By Caroline McGregor and Oksana Yablokova
Staff Writers

For two years, the Kremlin has been working on a new media law that would shorten its leash on the press.

By this fall, President Vladimir Putin is expected to introduce a bill to the State Duma that would replace the current media law, in place since December 1991.

The Kremlin-backed bill, according to people who have seen draft versions of it, threatens, among other things, to put newsrooms under the control of owners -- not editors -- and to take away journalists' right to keep their sources confidential.

Reporters would be required to name the source of their information, if called upon by a judge to do so during a hearing, Alexei Venediktov, the editor of Ekho Moskvy radio, said by telephone Wednesday.

"No other legislation in the world stipulates something like that," he said.

Beyond that, the bill would "eliminate any traces of editorial independence," said Andrei Richter, director of Moscow's Media Law and Policy Institute.

The new bill would do away with the statutes that journalists adopt to define and limit an owner's influence in the newsroom, he added.

"Owners will have the first and final word on any editorial issue, from graphic design to shaping a story," Richter said.

Owners, meanwhile, are to be held accountable for editorial content, which is likely to make them more sensitive to what their journalists say, and how they say it.

But Richter said, "It's a big mistake for media owners to think the law was drafted in their interest. There may be some marginal benefit for them, but mostly it serves the interests of the government."

Under the new bill, any violation of media legislation can be a pretext for shutting down a media outlet. "The state will have wider powers to reprimand, and stronger levers of influence," Richter said.

Which body will wield those oversight powers on behalf of the state is unclear, Venediktov noted, in the wake of government restructuring that abolished the Press Ministry. Richter thought it was likely to be the Justice Ministry.

Richter said the Kremlin's decision to write a new media law, in the absence of public pressure and the presence of a perfectly serviceable old one, was just a "precaution for the future."

It is not punishment for some publication's irreverence. "There's no event you can tie it to," Richter said.

Also, "if Putin gets private media subordinated, he can afford to keep just one state television channel and privatize the rest," as promised by former Press Minister Mikhail Lesin two years ago, Richter said.

The bill was initially drafted in 2002 by the Media Industry Committee, a group of leading figures chaired by Channel One general director Konstantin Ernst and of which Venediktov is a member.

Venediktov said a new law is necessary to identify media as business entities, but he took issue with the "political" clauses that endanger freedom of the press.

Many of these are changes made to the committee's original working draft, he said, and the author behind those changes was "anonymous, as usual."

Gazeta reported that Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the Kremlin administration, and Larisa Brychyova, head of the Kremlin legal department, were in charge of "supervising" the drafting of the bill.

Richter said the bill is now being vetted by the Kremlin's legal department, which needs to make it "more presentable" before the president formally introduces it in the Duma.