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Squealing and Bashing: Journalism Veteran Spoke about His Work on Radio Liberty

Last Tuesday, a Russian-language television station began to broadcast for Russia under a boring name Current Time. This is a joint product of two teams of "enemy voices", as they used to be called, Radio Liberty and Voice of America. The venture and the budget were created in the Obama era. Generally speaking, as the phrase goes, it is money laundry under the pretext of fighting against Russian propaganda. Everyone can make sure that’s true. Just type "Current Time", "TV channel", "watch online" in Yandex you can consider it advertisement, and watch it for at least three minutes out of curiosity. You won’t want to see it twice. You will immediately understand everything. It has neither appeal nor substance, it is a snoozefest and a boring story. And most importantly, there is nothing human. When you watch it, there is an overall feeling that they don’t need us there. They broadcast, as before, from across the pond and pretend that they know better what is necessary here. 24 hours. 7 days a week. Here goes nothing. Until recently, we were told that TV was crap and an idiot box, Internet was the decision maker. Now, they have come back to the television. Has something changed? Nevertheless, the Internet is also actively working against Russia from abroad. So-called opposition bloggers, such as Kasparov, Illarionov, Parkhomenko, Aleksashenko, Gessen, and Lebedinsky are in the United States. Khodorkovsky, Chichvarkin, and Guriev live in London. Ilya Ponomarev, Maria Gaidar, Ganapolsky, and Zhenya Kiselev are in Ukraine. The Baltic states host Ilya Krasilshchik and Artemy Troitsky. Rustem Adagamov lives in Prague. Alfred Koch is in Germany. Malgin is in Italy. A brave team that nourishes hatred towards Russia in the Russian Internet. They are teaching how to live while being abroad. Although being in different countries, they are all in one narrow burrow. Their product, which is sent to the Russian web, is black balls of lint. However, let’s go back to the foreign TV channel. This is an upgrade. Daria Pushkova reports from Prague. Current Time brings together the best journalists of the Russian-speaking world to present a fresh alternative to the Kremlin-controlled mass media. The Current Time project was launched by the Obama administration more than two years ago. Test broadcasts began last year, and February 7 this year the channel, created for Russian-speaking audience on the basis of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, was officially presented to the public at the Atlantic Council in Washington. The project is funded by the US Congress through the Broadcasting Board of Governors, BBG, which has existed since the times of the Cold War. The organization's budget for this year is 777 million dollars. Out of these, 22 million will be spent just on Current Time. The money is allocated, the webpage is working, the programs are being mounted, and, according to the commercial, the "best" journalists of the Russian-speaking world, many of who are hardly known, are already transmitting information the way they want. "Russia Today and Sputnik are attacking my country, attacking the European Union. Now, there is a new Russian-language TV channel to fight Russian propaganda". Broadcasting is carried out from Washington and Prague. Radio Freedom headquarters, from where the new TV channel operates, is protected better than some of the US embassies. Three perimeters of security, a high fence, bulletproof glass, gas attack security systems, autonomous energy supply, and, of course, surveillance cameras both external and internal. We tried to arrange an interview and filming inside the top-secret bunker of the world of journalism. But the TV channel politely refused to cooperate saying that the employees are extremely busy. Built like a military facility, the building has several underground levels where the classified files are stored. Elevators are without buttons, employees get only to their floor using an electronic badge. If necessary, heavy metal doors are locked, turning the building into a bunker. The decor correspond the situation. "I remember a huge image of a tank with Putin's portrait on the armor hanging right in front of my desk. I believe the tank rolled into either Tskhinval, or somewhere in South Ossetia. Such similar things are in other rooms, too, to remind that the enemy is right in front". Andrei Babitsky had worked on Radio Liberty since 1989 until he supported Putin’s decision on Crimea, for which he immediately lost his job. "And then I brought pictures from Donbass showing the exhumation of the bodies of soldiers executed by Nazi battalion Aydar. That's all. This was the reason for my dismissal. It happened after a collective scandal initiated by the Ukrainian department of the radio station, sort of a group Nazi". Neither the new channel’s form nor its content impressed Babitsky. "I don’t believe that such an ideological platform, which is very hostile towards Russia, can create some exciting, friendly and interesting broadcasting. If this had been some kind of an invitation to a dialogue, I would have watched it because of being interested. No it’s just a bucket of slops which was put on your head". Karen Agamirov is one of the veterans of Radio Liberty who was at the forefront of its Moscow office. He resigned himself when he realized that there was no journalism left where he worked. Agamirov: "You didn’t have to objectively analyze what was happening in our country, in Russia but simply talk about corruption, about how bad Putin was. That’s it. Nothing more was needed from you. Team relationships were horrible. It was all about frank squealing and letters to the American office". Murad Rakhimov became one of the victims of such squealing. He was invited to Prague in 2003 to criticize the policy of President Saparmurat Niyazov: "We had to broadcast standard facts, that America brings democracy and that it does the right things in foreign policy and in everything. That was what we used to say". And then, he was fired after 10 years of work for frank conversations with co-workers. "The reason for dismissal was the fact that my views on the standards of journalism and political views didn’t match, didn’t meet the requirements of our US management and leadership". Leo Roitman is a Soviet dissident and lawyer who worked at the station for more than 30 years and then retired. Now he's fighting for the rights of those fired from Radio Liberty. Despite his American citizenship and faith in the United States, he calls Radio Liberty as "Prague Guantanamo" for lawlessness of the employees of the organization. "This radio station needs to be honest in what it says about itself. But it starts speaking about itself with a lie. It says that it is an independent, a private radio station, and, I make a pause, that it is funded by the United States Congress. This is that nonsense that is told to the listeners". "We are talking about how to create a feeling of confrontation. In a sense, it is an attempt to step in the same river twice and return to the Cold War". It seems that on Current Time everything is working according to the old patterns of Radio Liberty. But for those, who are now just beginning, everything is yet to come. Thus, Ukraine has already made a proposal to the State Department to transfer the headquarters of the Radio Liberty from Prague to Kiev. US supervisors keep silent, but who knows where the path of Radio Liberty leads Current Time.

Squealing and Bashing: Journalism Veteran Spoke about His Work on Radio Liberty
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