In Russia lies are well paid

Media corruption is part of the pervasive graft in Russia. In its 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking countries from least to most corrupt, Transparency International placed Russia 121st, out of 163 countries. Many newspapers just keep repeating the key arguments of the politicians almost word for word.

Anna Severnova, the public relations director for the St. Petersburg office of a Western European political organization, spends a lot of time rejecting corrupt proposals from Russian journalists, writes Galina Stolyarova, a reporter for English-language newspaper The St. Petersburg Times in Transitions online.

"Last time it happened was just a couple of weeks ago. An imposing-looking woman approached me at a reception, wondering if our office would be interested in a favorable article," Severnova recalled. “ 'You know what I mean,' she added with a wink. She was confident, assured, not at all embarrassed. We didn't get to discussing the price because I said I was definitely not interested."

Some offers are more sophisticated. For instance, an official from the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, the local parliament, suggested that Severnova's office hire him as a media consultant, at a handsome monthly wage of $1,000. " 'It's simple,' he told me. 'You tell me what you need a report about, I send a fax to the right place, the journalist writes the report, and you send them on a weekend press trip to Finland or Sweden. That will get the local press raving about you guys,' " Severnova recalled him saying. "He was very businesslike and straightforward."

In a 2001 survey of 100 St. Petersburg journalists by the Russian Academy of Sciences, 12 percent admitted that they regularly produce stories involving hidden advertising. A further 18 percent said they produce such stories occasionally, and 37 percent said they had done so more than once.



Diferences are big. While Putin travels around with a contingent of reporters just as Bush does, the Kremlin press pool is a handpicked group of reporters, most of whom work for the state and the rest selected for their fidelity to the Kremlin's rules of the game. Helpful questions are often planted. Unwelcome questions are not allowed. And anyone who gets out of line can get out of the pool.

Is what in the Washington Post analyst Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center called "the illusion of democracy."

Since he took office in 2000, Putin has taken steps to centralize power and eliminated democratic checks and balances, writes Maria Danilova, journalist from Associated Press.
He has created an obedient parliament, abolished direct gubernatorial elections, tightened restrictions on rights groups and presided over the elimination of most opposition voices from the media, especially the television networks.

And some others, paid it with their lives. Like Anna Politkovskaya, the prominent Russian journalist who was famous for her critical coverage of the war in Chechnya and was discovered dead in Moscow. She was found dead in an elevator in a Moscow apartment building by a duty officer at a central Moscow police station. She had been shot to death, and a pistol and four bullets were found nearby. Politkovskaya was working on when she was murdered at the weekend, giving a grisly account of alleged torture by Chechen officials, was published in her newspaper today. The story in Novaya Gazeta included written testimony from a Chechen man extradited from Ukraine to a Chechen government office in Grozny.