This week, Pskovskaya Guberniya received a formal warning from the media watchdog organisation Roskomnadzor (Роскомнадзор) for crossing a red line.
License to publish at stake
According to Meduza, a case was raised against the outlet for mentioning the Ukrainian nationalist grouping Right Sector without adding the phrase “which is forbidden in Russia as an extremist organisation”.
Adding such an explanatory note is mandatory if a Russian or foreign organisation has been acknowledged in Russia as “extremist”. After two such warnings and a court ruling, Russian media can lose their license to publish and broadcast.
In September 2014, the newspaper was the first to report about Russian soldiers from the Pskov-based 76th Guards Air Assault Division of the Russian airborne troops having been killed in action in Donbas. A founder of the newspaper, Lev Shlosberg, is one of the leaders of the Russian opposition party Yabloko and was brutally beaten up after this report.
The newspaper has also written critically about the Pskov region’s governor.
New trend in provincial media
We see media in provincial Russian cities increasingly demonstrate independence.
This tendency was confirmed in the movement against disinformation on national TV, initiated by the local newspaper in far-eastern Siberian Yakutsk, which the Disinformation Digest reported recently.
Over the last week, the project’s initiator, Valery Bezpyatykh, has reported on his Facebok page about an increasing number of provincial Russian media joining the protest.