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Moscow shuts TV station that was critical of president

The Russian government on Sunday shut down one of the country's two main private television stations, forcing off the air a team of journalists who have been at the center of a debate over media freedom in Russia for the past two years.

TVS, created from the ashes of two other television stations that came into conflict with state-connected companies, was yanked off the air early Sunday. It was replaced with a new state-run sports channel. Some employees learned the station had been closed while listening to the radio on their way to work.

Coming ahead of December's parliamentary elections and next year's presidential vote, TVS' demise gives the government overwhelming influence over what goes out on the nation's airwaves, again raising questions about a free press in President Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The Ministry of Press cited "the financial, personnel and management crisis" at TVS as the reason for "this not simple decision which became impossible to postpone," according to a statement obtained by Ekho Moskvy radio and read on-air. The ministry said the decision was taken in part to "protect the rights of viewers." No one could be reached for comment at the ministry.

The closure was not unexpected -- debt-ridden TVS had been dropped earlier this month by Moscow's main cable company over unpaid bills, depriving it of its largest viewer market and TVS' news director warned Friday that the end might be imminent.

"The channel might have closed for the most trivial, financial reason, but by taking this step, they have added a political dimension to their decision," Yevgeny Kiselyov, TVS news director, was quoted as telling the Interfax news agency Sunday.

Television's strong political influence in Russia is no secret. Independent stations rallied behind former President Boris Yeltsin to help him win re-election over his Communist rival in 1996. But the same stations also angered the Kremlin by bringing piercing war footage of the first Chechen campaign into Russian homes nightly, helping turn public opinion.

Kiselyov and some of his journalistic team had originally worked for NTV, the biggest private station. But when NTV was taken over by the government-connected natural gas monopoly in 2001 in what critics said was an attempt to curb the station's critical coverage, Kiselyov and others fled to the privately-run TV6 in protest.

That station was shut down last year in a dispute with a shareholder, a government-connected pension fund. TV6 journalists then formed another station, TVS, backed by Media-Sotsium, a group of business executives loyal to the Kremlin.

TVS news didn't produce the kind of hard-hitting reporting that distinguished the previous NTV or TV6. But Kiselyov still went after Putin in his weekly Sunday news show, often with obvious disdain.

Liberal lawmaker Boris Nadezhdin of the Union of Right Forces party called it "the last TV channel that ventured to criticize Russian leaders."
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