Posted on 09/04/2005 1:54:10 PM PDT by REactor
Journalists with U.S. television network ABC were barred from entering Beslan School No. 1 last week to film commemorations for the anniversary of the Sept. 1-3, 2004, attack, an ABC spokeswoman said.
Beslan officials said ABC staff had not been included on a list of accredited journalists supplied by the Foreign Ministry in Moscow.
The Foreign Ministry said any decision about admittance to the Beslan school was a matter for local authorities.
ABC angered Moscow in July by broadcasting an interview with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who has claimed responsibility for seizing the school.
The Foreign Ministry, which accredits foreign journalists, said at the time that it would not renew the accreditation of staff members in ABC's Moscow bureau when they expired late this year.
Asked why the ABC crew had been barred Thursday from the school, Ksenia Gokoyeva, a spokeswoman for North Ossetian President Taimuraz Mamsurov, said, "We all know that they lost their accreditation after the Basayev interview."
Also Thursday, North Ossetian police prevented Radio Liberty correspondent Yuri Bagrov from covering the anniversary commemorations. Bagrov said police officers asked him for his accreditation and passport, and when he could provide neither, detained him. He was released in the afternoon and returned to his home in the North Ossetian capital, Vladikavkaz. Bagrov does not have a passport or accreditation after being stripped of both last year in a case that he and media freedom groups call retribution for his critical coverage of the ongoing war in nearby Chechnya.
heheheeee...
ABC. Always Broadcasting Cr@p!
"ABC staff had not been included on a list of accredited journalists" sounds good to me...
too bad we can't ban the abc @ssholes in this nation - ditto for CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC.....turn off all their microphones permanently....
Good. Let the dogs from A.B.C. go around making up their lies somewhere else.
Like say france.
Wouldn't it be completely sick to certify ABC as "journalists" at Beslan, when they broadcasted terrorist propaganda from the very person who arranged it?
I wonder how the survivors would feel about being interviewed by such a terrorist accomodating organization as ABC.
ABC's microphones would end up where they wouldn't want it, so keeping them away is probably for their own protection.
Good for the Russians. Too bad we cn't do the same wifh all the treasonoua, terroist-enBLING oranizartions in THIS XCOUNTRY; WOULD SAVE LIVES OF OUR TROOPS.
The first step is to get rid of that pesky Constitution with all its Liberal "Rights".
Precisely: that's the point.
While I do support the concept of freedom of the press I must confess I enjoy watching well placed censorship in action.
After enduring almost a century of Marxist propaganda, you really can't blame the Russians.
Don't think you could call what is happening in Russia "well placed censorship". Given the fact that the independent print press has gone the same way as independent television (ie it has become an arm of the state) -- the only free local media in Russia is Radio Echo Moscow. And for how much longer in Putin's "managed democracy".
This message needs to start being banged on about a bit more on FR. Putin's Russia is increasingly becoming something the West needs to worry about again. Nascent democracy has been crushed, and has been replaced with strident nationalism, often with an extremist tinge that is indulged by the Kremlin.
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