Mega Media Holding
Last week Lena on the Russian blog of neweurasia-Kazakhstan posted a story about creation of a new Kazakh media holding company, made up of state-owned and - of course - pro-government outlets. The official reason for that is increase of competitiveness of the country’s information space. However, as EurasiaNet reports today, independent media and free speech activists are, at the least, “suspicious” about the initiative.
“If we believe that we are a democratic society and one of the signs of this democracy is media freedom, then we should be against the government’s decision,” Ms. Azhenova from the journalists’ umbrella organization said. “This kind of centralization won’t be prosperous for freedom of speech. On the contrary, it seems to me that it would create additional obstacles.”
Read more in Bruce Pannier’s piece on EurasiaNet.
on July 14th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
It is so funny to even indicate the whole thing as a competitiveness.
The whole media is centralized by government anyway,and the rest, who is claiming themselves as suffering free media, are just pretentious, government back-ups. Nobody is looking into the roots of these antidemocratic actions/ideas and simple,endless talk without any actions will not change the situation there in thousand years.