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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (10666)	11/17/2001 9:31:31 AM
From: Poet	Respond to of 281500

LOL! Is this article serious? "Keep it Zipped" by James Bone? This cracks me up: Ad Age, a trade journal, reported that the NSA had hired the Baltimore agency of Trahan, Burden & Charles to draw up the campaign, based on the theme: ?Is it something we said??

To: maceng2 who wrote (10666)	12/4/2001 3:51:51 AM
From: maceng2	Respond to of 281500

Flint, Kiselyov: Last Bastions of Free Speech? By Alexei Pankin Imagine the following situation: A certain government is conducting anti-terrorist operations. The population and the majority of media outlets support it, but nevertheless the government considers it necessary to maintain tight control of the media's access to information on military operations. Then, suddenly, correspondents from another country pop up on the enemy side and give the enemy the opportunity to have their say -- and what's more, to sound off on live television about civilian casualties. The government decides to punish the subversive reporters. What associations does the above situation conjure up? Some will say the case of Andrei Babitsky, others will say al-Jazeera. And both are correct. The main difference between the two cases is in the severity of the punishment. Babitsky, a journalist with Radio Liberty, reported from the Chechen side of the front, was detained by federal forces and suffered psychological damage. The Kabul office of the Qatar satellite television station al-Jazeera, whose reports are picked up and used throughout the world, was reduced to rubble by U.S. rockets. Last week, White House spokesman Sean McCormack criticized the decision of a Russian arbitration court to liquidate the TV6 television company, declaring that this was a step backward on the path to a modern, democratic society. I wonder if Washington realizes that in Moscow, not just the words but also the deeds of the White House are analyzed? It is worth recalling that the much-criticized measures to limit press access to information during the second Chechen war were borrowed by the Kremlin not from Russia's totalitarian past, but rather from the propaganda arsenal of the United States and NATO, employed during the Desert Storm and Kosovo operations. Having observed how relations have developed between the authorities and the press in the United States since Sept. 11, it seems the Kremlin has come to the conclusion that they didn't act decisively enough on that occasion. The patriotic mood of the press, tight government control over information and "attacks" on those whose opinions differ -- this ideal, achieved in the United States, is what our authorities are striving to emulate. For example, from the Kremlin's point of view, TV6 in the hands of Boris Berezovsky is not much different from ABC being run by bin Laden. In the United States, this would be impossible and so it shouldn't be possible in Russia either. Today many U.S. and international human rights organizations are concerned about the current state of press freedom in America. Some believe that the media have become too close to the government. The majority, however, believe that this is merely a temporary aberration brought about by the extraordinary situation in connection with the war on terrorism, and that it won't be long before the press returns to its usual adversarial relationship with the government. Perhaps this is the case, or perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new "information order," an element of a new world order emerging from the events of Sept. 11. If this is the case, then the only people left to fight for freedom of speech (as understood in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution) will be "odious" characters such as Larry Flint, who filed a suit against the Pentagon for not accrediting Hustler magazine journalists who wanted to cover operations in Afghanistan, and TV6 general director Yevgeny Kiselyov, who launched the unsavory "Za Steklom" program on his channel. Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals (www.internews.ru/sreda) themoscowtimes.com