The battle over the ownership of NTV television—Russia’s largest non-government national TV network—appeared to Western eyes to be a story about the role that President Vladimir Putin was playing in the demise of freedom of the press. Andrei Zolotov, Jr., a reporter at the English-language Moscow Times, tracked extensively the course of events and writes about why this story is more about how journalists became embroiled in politics than it is solely about politicians limiting press freedoms. He also shares lessons that Russian media should learn from NTV’s situation.
Sanford J. Ungar, the director of Voice of America since June 1999, takes us inside the VOA coverage in China of the recent China-U.S. standoff over the grounded U.S. Navy surveillance plane. When examined in the context of usual news in China, VOA offers—in a variety of Chinese dialects—“an extraordinary array of perspectives for the people to hear.”