Thursday, October 23, 2008

Back to the Future: Problems with Russian News Media


Paul Goble has a sobering take on the state of Russian journalism these days. Shades of Soviet era censorship.

2 comments:

Huong said...

I find this problem similar to what's happening in Asia. ie. China, Japan (to some extent) and Vietnam ... Russia nowadays is not a socialist country anymore, but it is not a capitalist one. Although most of my parents generation have Soviet Union education, it seems that Russia nowadays is very foreign to that generation, not to mention my generation. Correct me if I am wrong, is it true that this article discussed about the value of democracy, freedom? How much Western do u think Russia is?

Yana said...

In response to Huong (because of course this is a topic I feel obligated to comment on), about Russia not being a capitalist country - in my opinion, while there is a lot of state control over economic resources (gas/oil is a good example), Russia is an extremely capitalist country. We could have a whole discussion about this and I could set out a list of reasons and examples, but instead I'm just going to copy and paste this link to an article talking about capitalism in Russia: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p21_Michaels.html. Overall though, I do think that while Russian capitalism is different from say, U.S capitalism, it is capitalism nonetheless, and in fact very extreme, often uncontrolled capitalism.
And on the third question, I think Russia is Western depending on where you are, after all it is a gigantic country. Moscow and St. Petersburg are extremely Western, and that might have to do with the fact that they are in the Western-most part of Russia, while more rural, Eastern parts of Russia are less Western. But I haven't been beyond the big cities since I was little, so I wouldn't really know.
Hope that answers your questions.