Bloomberg, The BBC, CNN And More Stop Reporting From Russia Over Putin’s ‘Fake News’ Law

For a little over a week now — in the aftermath of Russia launching an invasion into neighboring Ukraine on February 24, on the orders of President Vladimir Putin — the fighting that began with artillery barrages and airstrikes before escalating to ground battles has alternately gripped and terrified the world. Social media feeds are flooded with commentary and dispatches from the front, as casualties mount on both sides. News coverage of Ukraine’s improbable defense, which has both rallied the nation and come at a terrible cost to its people, has been similarly unrelenting.

Perhaps because progress has been slow-going for Russia, the increasingly ostracized nation is also stepping up a corresponding information battle that’s accompanied its assault on Ukraine. Tech platforms have cracked down on Russian news and state propaganda; Russia, in turn, has responded by banning Facebook and Twitter inside the country. Independent journalists are leaving Russia in droves, and on Friday, March 4, a flurry of major Western news outlets — ranging from CNN to Bloomberg, the BBC and more — announced that they’ll suspend broadcasting and reporting from Russia.

The pauses are in response to the country’s latest salvo in the war to control information about the Ukraine invasion, which came in the form of a so-called “fake news” law that Putin signed on Friday. After blocking access in-country to foreign news websites like The BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Deutsche Welle for reporting information that displeased the Kremlin, the Russian parliament passed a strict new law which does the following:

• Anyone spreading what the government decides is “fake” news about the country’s military faces a jail term of up to 15 years.
• A sliding scale of punishment is also included in the new legislation, including fines, for anyone found to have discredited the Russian military or spoken out in favor of sanctions against the country.

“Literally by tomorrow, this law will force punishment — and very tough punishment — on those who lied and made statements which discredited our armed forces,” Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin said, per Reuters.

No surprise, the new law was responsible for one foreign news organization after another announcing a pause on reporting from Russia — for fear, of course, that objective reporting which casts Russia in a negative light could be used as a pretext by the authorities to imprison reporters. A CBS News spokesperson, for example, told me: “CBS News is not currently broadcasting from Russia as we monitor the circumstances for our team on the ground given the new media laws passed today.”

Likewise, from a CNN spokesperson: “CNN will stop broadcasting in Russia while we continue to evaluate the situation and our next steps moving forward.”

Among other Western organizations reacting to the new law was the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., which also said Friday it would temporarily suspend reporting on the ground from inside Russia. “The CBC is very concerned about new legislation passed in Russia, which appears to criminalize independent reporting on the current situation in Ukraine and Russia,” the news organization said, in a statement posted online.

Moves like these have been described as contributing to a digital iron curtain that’s now descending around Russia, in the form of everything from the ban of all but approved information flows — to, also, the de-coupling of Russia from international companies like Samsung, Google, Apple, and FedEx, among others, which have all said they’ll stop doing business there in recent days.

As far as the journalism inside Russia, the kind of coverage that citizens get from state-sanctioned sources pushes a narrative about the supposed “genocide” of Russians in Ukraine. Putin has also described, and official media dutifully reports, that Ukraine’s leadership supposedly includes neo-Nazis, and the Russian military action is of course not described as anything even remotely comparable to an “invasion.” That, among other things, is illustrative of the kinds of things that are missing from news coverage in the country — where it’s also now harder than ever for people to find information across the internet, given the crackdown on foreign sources.

“Russia’s legislative assault on independent media outlets over allegations that they spread dangerous misinformation should be a reminder to people everywhere that no state should have the power to dictate to anyone what is false and unsuitable for public consideration,” former congressman Justin Amash said in a tweet posted Friday evening, as word of Russia’s new law continued to spread.