Putin just shut down RIA Novosti and VoR--and folded them into his OWN "RT" propaganda machine.

[pampango]

30. RIA Novosti was former President Dmitry Medvedev's effort to liberalize Russian media.

Well, Medvedev ain't the president anymore.

Even though the Kremlin funded RIA Novosti, Bennetts says he didn't feel any pressure to follow the government's line of thinking, making his experience "surreal" sometimes. For example, once when there was a protest against the government, he wrote this first sentence for his report: "Tens of thousands of people march through the centre of Moscow chanting Putin is a thief." Then at the end of the week, he picked up his Kremlin paycheck.

Bennetts says RIA Novosti was former President Dmitry Medvedev's "baby." "Medvedev was attempting to liberalize or, as he called it, modernize Russia, and part of this was a revamp on the RIA Novosti," Bennetts says.

The agency began to hire journalists with experience at major foreign news outlets, such as The New York Times, the BBC and The Guardian. Bennetts says if there was pressure to follow the Kremlin's line on reporting, none of these reporters would have continued to work there. But that was what irritated a lot of people in the Kremlin, namely, Putin supporters.

So now RIA Novosti will be morphed into a new media outlet called Russia Today. The person who will be heading it, Dimitry Kiselyov, is a defender of hardline Putin policies, like Russia's law against so-called "gay propaganda."

http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-12-10/state-run-news-agency-was-not-hardline-enough-vladimir-putin