Kyrgyzstan Currently Doesn’t Have a Single Journalist Accredited in Russia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 6 – Many former Soviet republics do not have journalists on the territories of others and instead rely almost exclusively on Russian reporting, a pattern that means Moscow determines not only which stories are covered but also how they are covered --regardless of the nationalities of the people involved.

            Kyrgyzstan, for instance, does not have a single journalist accredited in the Russian Federation despite million-plus Kyrgyz gastarbeiters there, Asilbek Egemberdiyev of the KGinfo portal says in an article entitled “Why Don’t Kyrgyz Media Want to Write about Russia?” (kginfo.ru/pochemu-kyrgyzskie-smi-ne-hotyat-pisat-o-rossii/).

            This pattern reflects three things, he suggests: the relative poverty of the Russian-language outlets in Kyrgyzstan, including those owned by the government; the domestic focus of these media which seldom have original reporting or analysis on other countries, including Russia; and the assumption Kyrgyz audiences can get news from Russia from Russian sources.

                Opening and maintaining an office with journalists in another country is expensive, but some Kyrgyz media do not even try to use stringers because in many cases the papers even the largest like Vecherny Bishkek aren’t in a position to pay even small honoraria, Egemberdiyev continues.    

                What is truly disturbing, however, is that the KNIA Kabar Information Agency, Kyrgyzstan’s analogue to Russia’s Novosti, doesn’t have a correspondent anywhere in Russia. As a result, when it does report news from Russia, it is invariably reporting news reported and processed by someone else, usually a Russian outlet. 

            Some Central Asian countries have a better record. Kazakhstan news outlets have five correspondent points in Moscow (Kazinform, Khabar, Kazakhstan, Bisnes.kz, and Kazakhstanskaya pravda). Others have one or two. But even those with offices in Moscow don’t have them elsewhere in Russia or in other former Soviet republics.

            Consequently, Russian news is Russian-produced news, and news about the disaporas Kyrgyz and otherwise is typically sporadic or second-hand (and typically taken from the Internet), a pattern that does not help the people in Kyrgyzstan or most of the other former Soviet republics really know what is going on.