By Nadezhda Azhgikhina, The Nation, Dec 22, 2017
Hasty decisions made on both sides of the Atlantic are causing irreparable damage to journalism as a whole.
The U.S. Department of Justice (and the mainstream U.S. media following its lead) has given a royal gift to the “ideological hawks” in the Kremlin, one that even the boldest propagandists dared not dream of. The Russian television channels RT and Sputnik have been forced to register as “foreign agents”; the stormy (and completely unsurprising) reactions have escalated the information wars, whose consequences are difficult to predict.
Russian lawmakers reacted to the DOJ’s decision emotionally and quickly: In just a few days, amendments were passed without discussion on Russia’s media law, adding paragraphs on foreign media and “foreign structures distributing information.” The law regulating non-commercial organizations can now impose on them the status of a foreign agent…
Read the full article at the original weblink above. Nadezhda Azhgikhina is a journalist, member of the Free Word Association, and vice president of the European Federation of Journalists. Translated for The Nation by Antonina W. Bouis. New Cold War.org does not share the writer’s view of a golden age of Western media which supposedly preceded the current wave of anti-Russia hysteria in Western media, nor the writer’s wholly negative portrayal of current Russian media.
