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After 23 years with The BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry is today horrified to see more evidence about how Vladimir Putin has tightened his control of Russia with torture and imprisonment, and that journalists like him have borne the brunt.
The grim list sadly keeps lengthening.
200 media organisations, and 100 journalists have fallen foul of the changing law in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
That’s on top of human rights defenders, political opposition figures, artists, playwrights, religious leaders and LGBTQ activists.
According to the United Nations (UN) at least 1,372 people have been charged with politically-motivated crimes in closed trials.
The punishments now in Russia or Russian-controlled territory, can be draconian too.
For example one alleged ‘criminal’ is a 68 year old paediatrician called Nadhezda Buyanova who faces 10 years in jail for allegedly making an anti-war remark to a soldier’s widow during her child’s check up.
But it is the crackdown on a free and independent media (which I think is EXTREMELY important in a society) that particularly worries me as a long-standing journalist.
The Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshyna died in Moscow’s Lefortvo jail (which is run by the Russian security agency FSB) in September.
Another journalist called Maria Ponomarenko along with many others has endured forced psychiatric detention.
Don’t be taken in by what passes to be Russian ‘media’ either.
RT (Russia Today) is effectively a mouth-piece for Mr Putin.
Yet both the headline-grabbing member of the Welsh independence group YesCymru (YC) Kerry-Anne Mendoza AND the Penarth-based conspiracy theorist who runs a media company, Anna Brees, have appeared on it.
In HER appearance on RT, Ms Brees announced: “I was a very good presenter” and said she wanted “good investigative journalism”.
She also said on the programme “the onus lies on us… to decide what information to trust… because I have built up a lot of trust (and people come to me saying) ‘you have integrity’ (but now there is) information chaos”.
Ms Brees stated, too, that her journalism is “important” and that she tries to “help people navigate out of this mess (the coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic)“, but ironically she walked out of another event in London when she discovered it had been funded by RT.
However the YouTube transmission of the programme on which she had appeared earlier clearly announced: “RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government”.
On it Ms Brees responded to the question: “As a former BBC lifer…do you recognise… (accusations about)…the patronising aspect and patronising nature of the mainstream media?” by saying “it’s very rare that we get any ‘exclusives’ from the (mainstream) media…journalists can be very patronising (but) I WASN”T patronising”.
And that “a lot of (mainstream) journalists out there at the moment…feel they are not representing the public and the news they are producing is…fed by communications departments.
“I really would like to see these institutions like the BBC listen a bit more to the public …the public are getting very angry …they need to listen more”.
Yet Ms Brees has herself worked in the mainstream media at ITV while latterly she was on the BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW) consumer affairs programme X-Ray, but after having a child she has said on another RT programme headlined ‘BBC journalist exposes the dark side’ that executives “begged me to go back”.
The man she compared herself to on the transmission, the notorious conspiracy theorist David Icke, has warned that the Archons (or Anunnaki) have taken over the world, and that a genetically modified human–Archon hybrid race of shape-shifting reptilians known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, the Illuminati, or the‘elite’, manipulate global events to help keep humans in constant fear.
Meanwhile Ms Mendoza, who appeared, too, on RT a number of times, has also hit the headlines.
For the programme On Contact, she said she wanted an “alternative media”, and was interviewed, as well, by Max Keiser on his RT show The Keiser Report, where she declared that austerity is a “fig leaf” designed to conceal aggressive neoliberal policies.
But Ms Mendoza has, herself, featured in the media, and perhaps that is why she wants ‘alternative’ coverage.
The coverage that is coming out in the media (outside Russia) is very alarming at the moment – and it doesn’t feature on RT – about the number of people who have been locked up by Mr Putin…
The memories of Phil’s astounding, decades long award-winning career in journalism (during which he was lucky enough to work in a largely free environment) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
