To commemorate the final closure of the Da Russophile blog and its permanent transfer and redirection to this site, here is a reprint of an excellent article by Nils van der Vegte (with a little editing from myself) that appeared in Jon Hellevig’s and Alexandre Latsa’s 2012 anthology on Putin’s New Russia. Truly Will Rogers’ […]
Спасибо Алексею Панкину за возможность расместить мою статью в одной из самых популярных газет в России (и за заглавье!), и Александру Меркурису за несколько идей и красивых оборотов речи. Читайте здесь: Вверх-вниз по рейтингу свободы. Ниже расположена более длинная версия, так как комсомольцы сильно сократили оригинал из соображений краткости: Недавно французская правозащитная организация «Reporters sans frontières» обнародовала
His comment on my last article on the safety of Russian journalists was so good, involving detailed and seemingly original research, that I thought it would be good to highlight it in a separate post. Also like the lawyerly way he goes about making his argument. 🙂 I have spent the last few days working
One of the most common tropes against Russia is that critical (independent, democratic, etc) journalists there are dying like flies, presumably because of the “culture of impunity” created by Putin or even on his express orders. It is rarely mentioned that the statistical chances of a Russian journalist dying by homicide is an order of
The Press Freedom Index issues by Reporters Without Borders is a good starting point for assessing journalistic freedoms in global comparative perspective. However, much like all attempts to measure democracy or Transparency International’s assessment of corruption perception, their methodology relies on tallying a number of intangibles that cannot be objectively estimated: Censorship, self-censorship, legal framework, independence. These