As Bad as the Russian Media Situation was in 2021, ‘It’s About to Get Worse’ in 2022, Experts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 18 – As bad as things have been for Russian media over the last year, Sergey Smirnov of MediaZona says, they are “about to get worse,” an assessment which Vasily Gatov, a Moscow-based analyst who is also a senior fellow at USC’s Annenberg Center (ridl.io/ru/media-2021-budet-huzhe/).

            The Kremlin’s crackdown over the past year, Gatov says, “has focused on the remaining traditional media” and has spread both to others that have violated what the Putin regime sees as the rules of the game. Significantly, he continues, it has been directed against nominally loyal media outlets as well, with various official interventions and harassments.

            Moreover, he says, “in 2021, the number of criminal cases against journalists, content creators and ordinary social media users rose dramatically.” And while advertising made a comeback from the pandemic lows, money from this source increasingly flowed not to all media but only to those segments loyal to the Kremlin.

            But despite all this, the independent media have continued to exist, even attracting increased attention and a Nobel Prize. Consequently, while the Kremlin undoubtedly hoped that what it did in 2021 would be enough to eliminate this problem for them, it is clear that they will have do take even more draconian steps in 2022 if they hope to end journalistic independence.

            Moreover, Gatov continues, there have been some positive developments or at least areas where the negative ones have not predominated. “There are areas of the information space that have not yet been affected by unbridled censorship and self-censorship” such as charitable activities and environmental protection.

            But it is also obvious that things are “about to get worse.”