Russia: News portal questions censorship on financial crisis

Posted by Rosemary D'Amour on November 20, 2008 at 5:06 PM

Prosecutors following through on the government's promise to crack down on journalists threatening "information attacks" on the economy have received criticism from the editor of an Internet news portal.

Aksana Panova, editor of www.ura.ru, accused Russian authorities of "censoring bad news about the financial crisis" after she was brought in for questioning about her sources, calling the government interference a "throwback to the Soviet Union."

President Dmitry Medvedev made a speech last month "urging law enforcement agencies to prosecute anyone maliciously spreading rumors that could cause banks to collapse."

Reporting on troubled banks, Panova said, is a part of her job.

"It's not the journalists they should be punishing but the management of the banks that got into trouble," she said.

Russia has been hit hard by the financial crisis, for example, its two main stock markets have lost "about 75 percent of their value" since May. The government has been strongly monitoring economic news coverage thus far, even going so far as to ban journalists from using words like "collapse."

Source: Moscow Times