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The speech is Mr Putin's last before he steps down next year
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| star-traveller |
| quote: | Putin attacks 'foreign meddlers'
The speech is Mr Putin's last before he steps down next year
Foreign money is being used to meddle in Russia's internal politics, President Vladimir Putin has said.
Mr Putin blamed the "influx" on those who he said were using democracy as a pretext to interfere in politics.
He did not specify those responsible, but in the past Russian authorities have accused the West of funding groups that oppose the government.
Mr Putin also reiterated his pledge to stand down when his term comes to an end in March 2008.
The Russian leader made the comments in his annual address to parliament, his opportunity to outline key policy objectives for the next year.
'Democratic ideology'
"There is a growing influx of foreign cash used to directly meddle in our domestic affairs," Mr Putin said.
"Not everyone likes the stable, gradual rise of our country," he said. "There are some who are using the democratic ideology to interfere in our internal affairs."
These meddlers were seeking to either to steal from the people or to attack Russia's economic and political independence, he said.
He also called for a moment of silence to commemorate former President Boris Yeltsin, who he said had laid the foundations for a changed Russia. He called for a library to be established in Mr Yeltsin's name.
Other highlights included:
a freeze on Russian compliance with a European treaty that limits military deployments across the continent
praise for Russia's economy, which he said was now one of the 10th largest in the world
a funding boost for state housing, using some of the proceeds from the auction of bankrupt oil giant Yukos
Mr Putin's speech was delayed by a day because of Mr Yeltsin's state funeral. |
Putin attacks 'foreign meddlers'
He is a damn right. |
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| skizzell |
| quote: | Originally posted by star-traveller
He also called for a moment of silence to commemorate former President Boris Yeltsin, who he said had laid the foundations for a changed Russia. He called for a library to be established in Mr Yeltsin's name.
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Yeah, how about a moment of silence for the people his administration had murdered? He is one shady dude. Glad to see him go soon. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Don't worry, Russia, Be Happy :D :
| quote: | April 22, 2007
50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
MOSCOW, April 21 — At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia’s largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be “positive.”
In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy, journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin.
How would they know what constituted positive news?
“When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”
In a darkening media landscape, radio news had been a rare bright spot. Now, the implementation of the “50 percent positive” rule at the Russian News Service leaves an increasingly small number of news outlets that are not managed by the Kremlin, directly or through the state national gas company, Gazprom, a major owner of media assets.
The three national television networks are already state controlled, though small-circulation newspapers generally remain independent.
This month alone, a bank loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin tightened its control of an independent television station, Parliament passed a measure banning “extremism” in politics and prosecutors have gone after individuals who post critical comments on Web chat rooms.
Parliament is also considering extending state control to Internet sites that report news, reflecting the growing importance of Web news as the country becomes more affluent and growing numbers of middle-class Russians acquire computers.
On Tuesday, the police raided the Educated Media Foundation, a nongovernmental group sponsored by United States and European donors that helps foster an independent news media. The police carried away documents and computers that were used as servers for the Web sites of similar groups. That brought down a Web site run by the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a media rights group, which published bulletins on violations of press freedoms.
“Russia is dropping off the list of countries that respect press freedoms,” said Boris Timoshenko, a spokesman for the foundation. “We have propaganda, not information.”
With this new campaign, seemingly aimed at tying up the loose ends before a parliamentary election in the fall that is being carefully stage-managed by the Kremlin, censorship rules in Russia have reached their most restrictive since the breakup of the Soviet Union, media watchdog groups say.
“This is not the U.S.S.R., when every print or broadcasting outlet was preliminarily censored,” Masha Lipman, a researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in a telephone interview.
Instead, the tactic has been to impose state ownership on media companies and replace editors with those who are supporters of Mr. Putin — or offer a generally more upbeat report on developments in Russia these days.
The new censorship rules are often passed in vaguely worded measures and decrees that are ostensibly intended to protect the public.
Late last year, for example, the prosecutor general and the interior minister appeared before Parliament to ask deputies to draft legislation banning the distribution on the Web of “extremist” content — a catch phrase, critics say, for information about opponents of Mr. Putin.
On Friday, the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., questioned Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and opposition politician, for four hours regarding an interview he had given on the Echo of Moscow radio station. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Kasparov of expressing extremist views.
Parliament on Wednesday passed a law allowing for prison sentences of as long as three years for “vandalism” motivated by politics or ideology. Once again, vandalism is interpreted broadly, human rights groups say, including acts of civil disobedience. In a test case, Moscow prosecutors are pursuing a criminal case against a political advocate accused of posting critical remarks about a member of Parliament on a Web site, the newspaper Kommersant reported Friday.
State television news, meanwhile, typically offers only bland fare of official meetings. Last weekend, the state channels mostly ignored the violent dispersal of opposition protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Rossiya TV, for example, led its newscast last Saturday with Mr. Putin attending a martial arts competition, with the Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme as his guest. On the streets of the capital that day, 54 people were beaten badly enough by the police that they sought medical care, Human Rights Watch said.
Rossiya and Channel One are owned by the state, while NTV was taken from a Kremlin critic in 2001 and now belongs to Gazprom. Last week, a St. Petersburg bank with ties to Mr. Putin increased its ownership stake in REN-TV, a channel that sometimes broadcasts critical reports, raising questions about that outlet’s continued independence.
The Russian News Service is owned by businesses loyal to the Kremlin, including Lukoil, though its exact ownership structure is not public. The owners had not meddled in editorial matters before, said Mikhail G. Baklanov, the former news editor, in a telephone interview.
The service provides news updates for a network of music-formatted radio stations, called Russian Radio, with seven million listeners, according to TNS Gallup, a ratings company.
Two weeks ago, the shareholders asked for the resignation of Mr. Baklanov. They appointed two new managers, Aleksandr Y. Shkolnik, director of children’s programming on state-owned Channel One, and Svevolod V. Neroznak, an announcer on Channel One. Both retained their positions at state television.
Mr. Shkolnik articulated the rule that 50 percent of the news must be positive, regardless of what cataclysm might befall Russia on any given day, according to the editor who was present at the April 10 meeting.
When in doubt about the positive or negative quality of a development, the editor said, “we should ask the new leadership.”
“We are having trouble with the positive part, believe me,” the editor said.
Mr. Shkolnik did not respond to a request for an interview. In an interview with Kommersant, he denied an on-air ban of opposition figures. He said Mr. Kasparov might be interviewed, but only if he agreed to refrain from extremist statements.
The editor at the news service said that the change had been explained as an effort to attract a larger, younger audience, but that many editorial employees had interpreted it as a tightening of political control ahead of the elections.
The station’s news report on Thursday noted the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Moscow metro. It closed with an upbeat item on how Russian trains are introducing a six-person sleeping compartment, instead of the usual four.
Already, listeners are grumbling about the “positive news” policy.
“I want fresh morning broadcasts and not to fall asleep,” one listener, who signed a posting on the station’s Web site as Sergei from Vladivostok, complained. “Maybe you’ve tortured RNS’s audience enough? There are just a few of us left. Down with the boring nonintellectual broadcasts!”
The change leaves Echo of Moscow, an irreverent and edgy news station that often provides a forum for opposition voices, as the only independent radio news outlet in Russia with a national reach.
And what does Aleksei Venediktov, the editor in chief of Echo of Moscow, think of the latest news from Russia?
“For Echo of Moscow, this is positive news,” Mr. Venediktov said. “We are a monopoly now. From the point of view of the country, it is negative news.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/w...int&oref=slogin |
Nothin' like a little more government-regulated cheer to keep your feelin' peachy everyday! |
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| star-traveller |
| quote: | Originally posted by skizzell
Yeah, how about a moment of silence for the people his administration had murdered? He is one shady dude. Glad to see him go soon. |
What people? What are you talking about? Have you watched a lot of X-Files (CNN/BBC/FOX) recently?
How about the US president who doesn't care about people lifes even more. His Administration killed around 100k innocent people in Iraq. How about a moment of silence for them? No? Bush is one shady dude. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by star-traveller
What people? What are you talking about? Have you watched a lot of X-Files (CNN/BBC/FOX) recently?
How about the US president who doesn't care about people lifes even more. His Administration killed around 100k innocent people in Iraq. How about a moment of silence for them? No? Bush is one shady dude. |
So you're defending Putin's actions by comparing him to Bush?
Just out of curiousity, how many media companies are run by the American government? |
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| metalgearsolid |
| quote: | Originally posted by MisterOpus1
So you're defending Putin's actions by comparing him to Bush?
Just out of curiousity, how many media companies are run by the American government? |
the pentagon channel. |
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| HardTranceProd |
| quote: | Originally posted by MisterOpus1
Just out of curiousity, how many media companies are run by the American government? |
I'd have to say this is a pretty weak argument. Sorry!
Even though NBC/CBS/ABC/etc. are not technically run by the US government, they are surprisingly obedient and tame when it comes to portraying the war in Iraq, for instance. As I've said here numerous times, you have to read international press (e.g. UK press) for stories that rarely see the light of day in the US.
Also keep in mind that it took a journalist from Ireland (that's right, remember that woman?) to ask Bush real questions about the war - questions that American journalists, even those opposed to him, had never dared to ask. Needless to say, Bush was surprised by the intensity of that interview, if you remember it.
The American mainstream media isn't that "free" and wonderful either. Most of it is bull. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by star-traveller
What people? What are you talking about? Have you watched a lot of X-Files (CNN/BBC/FOX) recently? |
Perhaps not all of his critics have been murdered, but they do have a strange habit of disappearing or being exiled:
| quote: | * Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in Moscow on 7 October. She was the author of several books that were highly critical of both Mr Putin and Russia's campaign to quell separatist sentiment in Chechnya. Nobody has been arrested in connection with her murder. Liberals believe she was killed by a heavy-handed state; the Kremlin believes that she was murdered to make Mr Putin look bad.
* Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once Russia's richest man but he began opposing Mr Putin. A Moscow court found him guilty of fraud and embezzlement and he is now in a Siberian prison.
* Leonid Nevzlin is a billionaire wanted for murder. He has incurred the Kremlin's wrath and now lives in Israel. He contends that the fraud and murder charges against him are fabricated.
* Boris Berezovsky is a critic of Putin who won political sanctuary in the UK. The Russian government regards him as a criminal and has unsuccessfully tried to have him extradited.
* Shamil Basayev was killed in July in "a special FSB operation". Few shed tears. Known as the Butcher of Beslan, Basayev was a terrorist who targeted civilians in his struggle for an independent Chechnya.
* Viktor Yushchenko, the President of Ukraine, still bears the facial scars of a horrific poisoning incident in 2004, a time when he was battling for the job against a pro-Russian contender.
* Mikhail Kasyanov was Putin's Prime Minister but was fired in 2004. He has styled himself as a presidential contender for the anti-Putin camp in 2008 but has been rubbished in the media.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1998841.ece |
And of course, not to forget Alexander Litvinenko:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...9/npoison19.xml
Not to say that these folks were all angels, but again the coincidence of poisonings, assassinations, and charged crimes against them is a bit hard to dismiss. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by HardTranceProd
I'd have to say this is a pretty weak argument. Sorry!
Even though NBC/CBS/ABC/etc. are not technically run by the US government, they are surprisingly obedient and tame when it comes to portraying the war in Iraq, for instance. As I've said here numerous times, you have to read international press (e.g. UK press) for stories that rarely see the light of day in the US.
Also keep in mind that it took a journalist from Ireland (that's right, remember that woman?) to ask Bush real questions about the war - questions that American journalists, even those opposed to him, had never dared to ask. Needless to say, Bush was surprised by the intensity of that interview, if you remember it.
The American mainstream media isn't that "free" and wonderful either. |
I think my feelings against our lapdog media here in America are well-known. However they do not by any stretch of the imagination remotely compare to a company OUTRIGHT OWNED by our government. That's a conflict of interest that would not fly by any stretch of the imagination. Again that's not to say their guilt of being intellectually inept as well as investigative laziness run amock goes unnoticed (if anyone watched Bill Moyers last night on PBS, it's a madening example), but the comparison between a privately run corporation and a government run one is not a very good one. |
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| Haunted |
lol @ dumbasses defending Putin
theres no democracy in Russia, please. people can't even protest, you call that freedom? |
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| MrSquirrel |
Putin attacking "foreign meddlers" is one of the biggest cases of the pot calling the kettle black I have ever seen.
But openly meddling with the elections in another sovreign country is ok when that sovreign country was once a Soviet republic, right?
MrS |
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| metalgearsolid |
| quote: | Originally posted by Haunted
lol @ dumbasses defending Putin
theres no democracy in Russia, please. people can't even protest, you call that freedom? |
Please, this is coming from someone who said he'd have no idea how anyone could spend ten million dollars.
There is some democracy in Russia. Don't listen to what the Western media says. The national Bolshevik Party is partly funded by western special interest groups aka "cia" to destabilize Russia. The major problem in Russia isn't Putin. It's the authorities, mostly the police, who are racist and totalitorian. This has nothing to do with Putin. He doesn't even have that much control over what happens in Russia. Now that is a true democracy. |
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