Kremlin squeezing rogue news outlet

Station now operates from apartment

MOSCOW -- Among the five TV journalists interviewing Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the odd one out was easy to spot. Mikhail Zygar's questions were sharper than those of the others, who headed back to spacious television studios while Zygar broadcast his piece from a Moscow living room.

The Dozhd news channel, whose editor-in-chief Zygar was given a Committee to Protect Journalists award last month, rose to prominence in 2011 with its coverage of the mass protests against Vladimir Putin, who was then prime minister but preparing to return to the presidency. State-owned television largely ignored the protests.

As other Russian television channels provided propaganda backing for the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and Russia's aggressive policy toward Ukraine, Dozhd didn't follow the lead -- and is now paying for it.

Putin's government has been careful not to order the channel to shut down, but a Kremlin-instigated campaign has driven this rare independent broadcaster to the brink of demise.

A Soviet-era apartment in central Moscow now houses the studio of Dozhd, whose combined online and TV audience is about 12 million. Anchorman Pavel Lobkov sits on a chair in what was once a spacious living room.

Lobkov, 47, shrugs off the challenges, recalling his early days in television during the Soviet Union's perestroika era.

"Things were probably even tougher then: We had no Internet, no Skype, no cellphones. I went live from war zones, so these comfortable surroundings of an apartment can hardly unsettle me," he said.

Pressure on independent media intensified this year as the Kremlin sought to unify the country behind the annexation of Crimea and Russia's involvement in eastern Ukraine.

Since its inception in 2010, Dozhd had its studio in a former chocolate factory on the Moskva River, but its landlord broke the lease in November. Sympathizers offered Dozhd a place elsewhere, but last week they were told they can't broadcast out of there anymore.

Dozhd doesn't want to make public its new temporary location.

As recently as January, Dozhd broadcast both online and on cable networks, expanding its reach to Russian regions that still largely get their information from state-owned television. Its troubles began when Dozhd was covering the daily anti-government protests in Ukraine, which state-owned television dismissed as a neo-Nazi coup.

The crackdown came at the end of January, when Dozhd hosted a history program on the 1941-44 Siege of Leningrad and put a question up for a vote: Would it have been worth it to surrender Leningrad to save lives? Famine in the city, now called St. Petersburg, during that siege killed more than 500,000 people.

The question caused a stir for its implication of a lack of patriotism, prompting Kremlin officials to call for a shutdown of the channel. Dozhd apologized, but that didn't seem to help.

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, accused Dozhd of "crossing a moral and ethical red line."

Nearly all cable networks dropped Dozhd in a matter of days.

Problems multiplied in summer, when the Russian parliament passed a bill that barred cable channels from running ads, said Natalya Sindeyeva, who has led Dozhd since its interception. The channel cut its expenses in half, shed about 30 percent of its staff and reduced its monthly budget to $357,000 before being hit with the eviction notice.

Talks with potential landlords have so far been futile.

"If it's not in the business interests (of cable networks) to cut off Dozhd, then what other reason can it be? There can be no explanation other than the political one," she said.

Zygar insisted that broadcasting out of an apartment is a temporary measure that doesn't affect the quality of the content Dozhd is providing, and he said its audience is still growing.

Russia was ranked 148th out of the 180-country press freedom index by Reporters Without Borders this year.

Journalists at Dozhd say the state propaganda is taking its toll. But the country's shrinking economy and decline in living standards -- the ruble has lost around half its value since January --could soon change that.

"As the economic crisis deepens, this mood will subside. People will start asking questions [like], 'why life is so bad, is it really that the United States is really to blame for everything?'" Lobkov said.

Dozhd raised about $1 million in a crowd-funding campaign in March, proving that the demand for independent media in Russia is still there, Zygar said.

"The situation that our country has gotten itself into is a lot more serious, and in this situation our audience needs our work even more, so we don't even think about stopping," Zygar said. "It's our work, it's our fight."

A Section on 12/22/2014

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