Follow this authorLee Hockstader's opinions
FollowTo sustain their reporting, they rely largely on charity. That means thousands of donors, mainly foundations and individuals in the West. At some outlets, those gifts now account for three-quarters of the revenue needed to pay for TV studios, equipment, travel and salaries.
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The resulting work is accessed by millions of Russians on YouTube, Telegram and the other remaining pinholes of uncensored content.
It is a crucial undertaking that enables a tendril of straight news to pierce the Kremlin’s thickets of lies. Its death would mean that Putin’s brainwashing project, which has already captured and coerced so many of his subjects, would go uncontested.
But the sense that they are working on borrowed time is an undercurrent to everything I’ve heard from Russian journalists. It is because of not only the uncertainly of funding but also the Kremlin’s intensifying efforts to muffle information that does not slavishly echo propaganda.
“In 2022, our Russian website was blocked four times,” said Alexander Gubsky, publisher of the Moscow Times, who described the regime censors’ cat-and-mouse game to silence unfettered reporting. “Last year, it was blocked four times a week.”
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Mikhail Fishman is the well-known host of a weekly show on TV Rain, an independent channel that was banned after the invasion, prompting dozens of staffers to flee. It now works from Amsterdam; Fishman’s show attracts well over half a million viewers on YouTube and more on other platforms.
“Russian exile journalism still matters,” he said. It transmits a critical message to opponents of the regime and the war: You are not alone.
An echo of that message recently surfaced with the news that an antiwar candidate had announced he would challenge Putin in next month’s sham presidential election. The candidate, Boris Nadezhdin was predictably banned by Russia’s electoral commission, which issued its ruling Thursday. The fact that tens of thousands of Russians had declared their support anyway, lining up in public to sign his ballot petitions, hinted at the latent opposition to the........