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Russian media freedoms still uncertain - minister
By Clara Ferreira-Marques
MOSCOW, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Media Minister Mikhail Lesin, the man who flicked the switch to close Russia's last independent national television channel, said on Wednesday economic and private interests still played too great a role in the media.
Lesin ordered TV6 closed last month after a court upheld a ruling it was bankrupt, giving the Kremlin a virtual monopoly of the airwaves for the first time since the Soviet era.
Speaking to the State Duma lower house of parliament, Lesin said the Moscow media had emerged from the ownership and censorship disputes that followed the Soviet Union's collapse but that many regional bosses kept a tight grip on journalists.
"In the regions, the media are still used to solve business problems," Lesin said. "There is unquestionably a threat to freedom of speech."
Regional leaders amassed huge influence under ex-president Boris Yeltsin and local elections remain marked by populist pitches to voters and even by the detention of journalists.
Several reporters were detained while covering an election in recent weeks in Yakutia, in Russia's far north. The Moscow daily Vremya Novostei newspaper described the contest as "the most scandalous vote in the history of regional elections."
Journalists have been frequent targets in Russia.
In July 2000, the head of an independent radio station which exposed official corruption in Smolensk in western Russia was murdered by his home. A number of journalists covering the military campaign in rebel Chechnya have also been found dead.
CALL FOR ALTERNATIVE VOICES
The head of Russia's Journalists' Association, Igor Yakovenko, said Lesin had finally "understood the obvious" -- that political interference was a bad thing. But he made clear that held true for the centre as well as the regions.
"One of the first steps ought to be to make a list of people who own stakes in the media and to reduce the weight of the government," Yakovenko told Ekho Moskvy radio.
Liberal deputy Viktor Pokhmelkin also criticised state control, saying not enough was being done to allow dissenting voices to air their views and state television and radio tended to show a single view.
"If you believe Mr Lesin, all the editors like and are loyal to the president," he said. "You forget there are alternative political forces in state bodies, including parliament."
For his part, Lesin said financial heavyweights now wielded considerably less influence over the national media and were therefore less likely to be able to "settle scores."
"In recent years, there has been a clear politicisation of the media. It has been governed not so much by economic, as by political principles," he told deputies. "But I believe the situation in which whole sections of media served specific persons, financiers or businessmen, is now improving."
Lesin told parliament a tender to find a new broadcaster to replace independent channel TV6 would be free and open to all, including the same team of journalists who broadcast on the frequency before it was shut down last month.
"It will be an open contest," he said.
The channel's owner, Boris Berezovsky, said the shutdown was part of a campaign to bring to heel all Russian media. Many of the channel's journalists had left NTV, an independent channel taken over by gas giant Gazprom after it ran up large debts.
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