Caharkala – President Ramzan Kadyrov of the Russia’s puppet government in Chechnya said that he would transfer high standards of press to Chechnya from Russia, a country that already has some notorious prestige in its handling of press freedom.
What Kadyrov tends to describe as improvement of press quality differs largely from how journalists tend to perceive it. Journalists think that the new standards will rather be intended to restrict journalists in their freedom to choose subjects to cover.
Kadyrov met with a group of journalists working in Chechnya on the News Day of November 26. Although he acknowledged that journalism was a kind of job with the same level of difficulty and danger as security forces, Kadyrov further said that the government would conduct a study on magazines as well as newspapers of Chechnya so that a comparison of the level of quality of the Chechen press could be made with the Russian-wide application of press standards. He also said that successful journalists would be rewarded for their work.
Kaydrov did no elaborate further on the study to be conducted. The Caucasus Times reporter, however, wrote in his report that no journalist had been courageous enough to ask the president about the study. "According to the local journalists, Kadyrov is not happy with the level of freedom that some news media organizations of Chechnya have in their choice of topics to cover."
ÖZ/FT
