Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [202]
Novaya gazeta: So, politics is not just a form of business?
Condoleezza Rice: No, it’s not. It’s a form of service. [Politicians have] different values than those who go into other professions.
Dmitriy Muratov: Yesterday we read a report from Reporters Without Borders [The Worldwide Press Freedom Index for 2005] which shows Russia in 138th place in the world in terms of free speech, but the United States is in 137th place in respect of reporting on events in Iraq. What is this – self-censorship by journalists or state policy? Fear or patriotism?
Condoleezza Rice: It’s certainly not government policy. But I’ll tell you something, I watch our reporting on Iraq every day, and our reporters in Iraq are very tough on the US Government. It was the American press that exposed the very bad events at Abu Ghraib. That came out first in the American press. I don’t know what study you’re talking about, but the US press reports exactly what they think, and they try to do it accurately. With press reporting – with freedom of the press – goes responsibility. It’s not just reporting anything you hear or anything someone tells you. The American press tries to be accurate in what they are reporting, but they report in the very toughest of circumstances.
There is one circumstance that sometimes the American press will not report: if it is going to put our soldiers in danger. Then they may decide that they do not want to report on something that might cost American soldiers their lives. That’s another part of press responsibility. The Government can’t force the New York Times not to print something, but the New York Times can decide if something is potentially dangerous to the lives of American soldiers and not print it.
Zoya Yeroshok, Andrey Lipsky, Dmitriy Muratov, Ilya Politkovsky
Elena Romanovna, Philologist, Translator
From a radio behind a grille outside a shop I heard snatches of a report: “Militia and ambulances in front of the entrance … journalists waiting for the body of Anna Politkovskaya to be brought out …” I stopped and looked about me, at people’s faces. It was as if nothing had happened. Had they not heard? I ran home, turned on Echo of Moscow radio, and stood numb with shock by the door. Eight years ago I felt the same blow when I heard Galina Starovoitova had been murdered, and the same sense of emptiness, except that now it felt more like a vacuum which makes it impossible to breathe or go on living.
I went to the Metro station to buy Novaya gazeta. There were several people in front of me also buying newspapers and magazines. I looked hopefully over their shoulders, but no. A glossy crossword magazine, Sport, Vedomosti, World of Crime. I hunched up against the cold, feeling lonely and ill at ease in my own town. And now also frightened. I looked at the mothers walking placidly by with their prams. Were they not afraid? Apparently not. They probably really believe that life in Russia has improved, that per capita income is rising inexorably, and that we are the best and strongest superpower in the world. They probably believe that Russia’s democracy is in great shape, only ours is a special kind, “sovereign” democracy which is completely different from what they have in the West. From developed socialism to sovereign democracy! Any day now they will blow the dust off the old history textbooks, and today’s schoolchildren will sing a slightly adapted Soviet national anthem in patriotism lessons, under a portrait of little Volodya (only now not Ulyanov but Putin), and will solemnly promise to do their duty to their Great Motherland and learn to inform on each other.
Where now are all those who huddled round their radios to listen with bated breath to the speeches of the Democrats at the First Congress of Deputies, who collected signatures for the Sakharov Constitution, and rejoiced when the Berlin Wall came down? The years of my youth were those of perestroika. How avidly we read Dr Zhivago, Gulag Archipelago, Dudintsev’s White Clothes. Could I have dreamt then that very soon we would recoil,