Posted by Sean on January 17, 2008
Russia is not free. That’s the conclusion Freedom House has made in its new report “Freedom in the World 2008.” According to its scorecard, Russia received a “6″ in Political Rights and a “5″ in Civil Liberties. The scale puts “1″ as the most free and “7″ as “not free.” The main reason the report cites Russia’s continued unfree slide was the charges of vote rigging in Duma elections this fall. You wouldn’t know it from the scorecard. Compared to last year’s report, there has been no numerical change in Russia’s freedom, or should I say, lack thereof.
Granted, I don’t take these attempts to quantify such philosophically weighty concepts like “freedom” very seriously. There is just something comical about such studies. Is it the reports’ crass reductionism? Is it how assigning measurement to freedom seems to trivialize its meaning? Or is ..read more
Posted by Sean on January 17, 2008
It seems that I was led astray. Or I didn’t read the fine print. I was under the impression that the Moscow News had ceased publication. I found out about this from a story in the Toronto Star by Kelly Toughill which Robert Amsterdam posted on his blog. In her article “Free Press Under Siege in Russia,” Toughill wrote:
Moskovskiye Novosti (Moscow News) shut down this week. Novosti was the most influential newspaper in Russia as the Soviet Union was falling apart. People stood in line for hours to get a copy, amazed to see the truth on paper for the very first time. Its demise seems symbolic.
Symbolic in the sense that print newspapers around the world are feeling the economic crunch. In a press release in December, Daniel Kupsin, MN’s administrative head, said that “we don’t see any commercial value in [the paper's] continued ..read more
