RUSSIA - June 2 - TV Anchorman Sacked.

The leading TV channel NTV bans a highly rated weekly news and analysis programme and sacks its popular anchorman Leonid Parfenov. (This is a major blow to Moscow's fragile freedom of speech. Parfenov was sacked after he protested that NTV network channel bosses ordered him not to broadcast an exclusive interview with the widow of Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, a Chechen separatist killed in Qatar, scheduled for May 24. This was a disturbing sign of the influence of the siloviki - a general term for the security services - in Russia and the lack of tolerance towards independent media under Pres Putin). Parfenov says: "They [the NTV's bosses] told me to withdraw the interview from the programme and cited a request from the security services. I refused to cover up for them and asked for a written order, which they [the NTV] have issued. This is the first time in my memory anything in Russia had been banned on a written order since 1990". (NTV, Russia's first independent channel, was taken over by Gazprom, the state controlled gas monopoly, in a bitter row between the Kremlin and its Jewish founder Vladimir Gusinsky, a media tycoon who was forced to leave the country). Russia's leading political analyst Lilia Shevtsova says: "The dismissal of Parfenov confirms that the censorship exists even in the channels not directly controlled by the state". But she says, while the pretext on which Parfenov was sacked was understandable, the ban was part of a wider political process.