8 resign from Russian news agency

MOSCOW -- Eight correspondents have resigned from a Russian broadcast news agency to protest the pro-Kremlin management's decision to withhold stories in line with a new policy that half its coverage must portray the government in a "positive" light, journalists said.

The reported policy by the Russian News Service, which provides news broadcasts to Russia's most popular radio network and runs its own station, heightens concerns over President Vladimir Putin's moves to increasingly bring mass media under state control or influence.

In another case highlighting the concerns, the Russian Union of Journalists is protesting an order that it vacate its offices in a building that houses state media operations.

The union said it received the order from the state property agency to make space for Russia Today, an English-language satellite TV channel that critics see as little more than a Kremlin propaganda tool. The union said the order was dated April 18, but delivered Tuesday.

As Russia heads into a parliamentary election in December and presidential elections in March, government influence over the media appears to be at its strongest since the Soviet era ended.

Analytical programs on Russia's main TV channels are increasingly infrequent and less likely to express criticism of the Kremlin. The state runs one of the country's three major TV networks and has a direct controlling stake in another, along with owning the two of the largest radio networks.

NTV television, the third major TV network once noted for its criticism of the Kremlin and independent reporting on the war in Chechnya, has been taken over by the state-controlled natural gas monopoly Gazprom, which also owns the newspaper Izvestia.

Artyom Khan told The Associated Press on Friday he was one of eight correspondents to leave or submit their resignations since the new management took over at the Russian News Service, which provides news for its own station as well as others, including Russian Radio -- the nation's biggest radio broadcaster, with an audience of 7.4 million daily.

Khan said his news editors told him that his report last month on pro-Kremlin protests outside the Estonian Embassy in Moscow had a "pro-Estonian accent" and was "unprofessional." The protests were held over Estonia's decision to move a Soviet war memorial from the capital's downtown area to a cemetery, angering many Russians in the country.

Editors also refused to air material he produced on a Moscow march by the Kremlin's political foes in April, which was broken up by club-wielding riot police, Khan said.

"I can't say that the new policy is anti-Western or anti-American, but it is clearly pro-Russian," Khan said. "You have to convey the line of the party of power."

Mikhail Baklanov, the Russian News Service's former editor-in-chief who was fired in April by the new managers, confirmed that a number of his colleagues had quit.

"People left because there was no chance to work professionally," he said. "They weren't able to do what journalists do. They were told that the first news item must be positive and the last news must be positive, while negative news must amount to no more than 50 percent" of the report.

Elsa Vidal, a director specializing in Russia with the media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, said the resignations were a positive sign that journalists were willing to form a unified front to resist government pressure.

"It's a desperate turn, but a good turn because the journalists could have accepted the new rule and that would've been even more appalling," she said by phone from Paris, where the group is based.

The company that owns RNS, Russian Media Group, said Saturday that no one was available to comment on the resignations.

The newspaper Kommersant cited the RNS general manager Vsevolod Neroznak as saying that the departure of journalists was "a usual affair ... restructuring of the company is taking place."

The service's policy "has not changed. The delivery of the news has simply become more considered," he was quoted as saying.

The Russian Union of Journalists, meanwhile, decried the government's decision to remove it from its offices.

The property agency "is throwing out into the street an organization with a 90-year history, counting more than 100,000 journalists in its ranks and making, we may assert, a definite contribution to the construction of a democratic society," the union said in a statement.

Joel Simon, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, also denounced the move, calling on the government to "stop harassing our colleagues, and to allow them to do their work freely."