REN TV - News Coverage

News Coverage

In November 2005 REN TV fired Olga Romanova, the anchor of its daily 24 news flagship. Despite much publicity around the incident, her independent manner of reporting was continued by Marianna Maksimovskaya, formerly an anchor and news presenter for Vladimir Gusinsky's NTV Station. As of October 2011, Maksimovskaya was still in charge of news broadcasts on REN TV. Due to her activities, the channel remains arguably Russia's the only major TV outlet with liberal views, discussing the problem of state censorship and showing interviews with leaders of the political fringe (including Other Russia).

Prior to her departure from the channel, Romanova had told the Radio Free Europe on 25 November 2005 that the channel's head, Alexander Ordzhonikidze had pulled two recent stories for, she felt, political reasons. One censored item had covered an investigation into Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov's son's involvement in a road accident in which a woman died. Romanova spoken about the alleged censorship on Ekho Moskvy radio on 23 November 2005 – and the next day Ordzhonikidze barred from entering the channel's building. A second 'banned item had been about the building in central Moscow of a US $15 million church and clock tower by Zurab Tsereteli, the Internmational Press Institute noted in its report on 2005.

Ordzhonikidze said in an interview for Echo of Moscow radio station that REN's news output had low ratings and management had decided to try other anchors on the evening newscasts. "Besides, it's hard for one person to anchor all the nightly newscasts every day of the week. might just feel ill," he had added.

In solidarity with Romanova, several of her journalist colleagues quit the channel in December 2005. Head of news and deputy channel director, Yelena Fedorova, told Radio Liberty's Russian Service (Radio Svoboda) why she had resigned. "A lot of content-related directives have passed by me. As a journalist, I cannot put up with that, I cannot live with that," she told state news agency RIA Novosti on 5 December 2005. Editor Olga Shorina and producer Tatyana Kolokova were also planning to leave the channel because, they said, it was impossible to perform their professional duties.