Three leading figures of the Russian opposition are calling on Washington to reverse its decision to reduce Radio Liberty’s Russian-language broadcasts next year, lest Russian citizens, at a time when Moscow has established “practically complete control” over domestic radio and television, lose a vital source of “objective information.”
In a letter to the US State Department, the foreign affairs committees and the Helsinki Commission of the Congress, and presidential candidates John McCain and Barak Obama, the three – Vladimir Bukovsky, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Boris Nemtsov – say that reducing such broadcasts from abroad would make their struggle for freedom that much more difficult.
The Voice of America ended Russian-language radio broadcasting earlier this summer not only as part of a general cost-cutting effort but because the affiliates in Russia on which its programming was broadcast increasingly refused, under pressure from the Russian government, to carry VOA programmes.
Read the full story from GeorgianDaily.com
(R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)