Eco en la oscuridad: la voz disidente en Rusia

Encuentro en The New Yorker un interesante reportaje sobre la estación de radio rusa Eco en la oscuridad. Se trata de un encomiable ejercicio de disidencia frente a un escenario de férreo control de los medios de comunicación por parte de Putin. La historia de los últimos años de esta estación, y del grupo de reporteros que la hacen funcionar día a día, es una excelente estampa de las medidas del gobierno ruso para callar aquellas voces críticas. Aquí un fragmento del reportaje:

After Yeltsin retired, on the New Year’s Eve before the new millennium, Putin assumed power and soon moved against the media, using financial and legal leverage to take over, or shut down, newspapers and television stations whose coverage he deemed unfriendly or whose ownership he deemed uncoöperative. Reporters Without Borders, in its worldwide press-freedom index, ranks Russia, in terms of liberty, a hundred and forty-fourth out of a hundred and sixty-nine countries—just behind Afghanistan and Yemen and just ahead of Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.
When Putin was asked by a writer how he would respond to critics who accuse him of limiting media freedom, he replied, “Very simply. We have never had freedom of speech in Russia, so I don’t really understand what could be stifled. It seems to me that freedom is the ability to express one’s opinion, but there must exist certain boundaries, as laid out in the law.”
Article 29 of the Russian constitution says otherwise; it “guarantees” freedom of speech. Nevertheless, Putin brought the Russian media to heel with ruthless speed. The independent television station NTV, which had aggressively covered the war in Chechnya, was taken away from its founding owners in 2001 and neutered; Channel One, by far the biggest station in Russia, is once more a compliant extension of government policy.
For Putin, only television really counts. The heads of the networks are summoned to regular weekly meetings at the Kremlin to set the news agenda; executives are provided with lists enumerating the names of political opponents who are not permitted on the air. The loyalty of important anchors, station managers, and star reporters is bought with unheard-of salaries. Live television discussions and interviews no longer exist. There are newspapers and Web sites that are at least as free as Echo, but their audiences are so limited that Putin is content to relegate them to the margins and leave them alone.
“The problem is that official propaganda on television is extremely distracting—it insures that people talk about the nonsense they are showing,” Yulia Latynina, a well-known newspaper columnist and commentator on Echo of Moscow, told me. “For example, if Russia drops a rocket on Georgia from a plane, the report will talk about the size of the hole and whether or not the Georgians dug the hole themselves and all sorts of other nonsense. Suddenly, you are talking about holes and not about whether Russia is trying to scare the hell out of the Republic of Georgia and other such ‘enemies.’ And television makes up things, too, about supposed enemies like Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia. Everyone is our enemy. Who is a good guy? Andorra? Iran? All of it is a diversion from real political information and thought.”