"In 2000, NTV, a Russian television channel known for its independent, muckraking coverage, was among the country's most watched stations.The evening news reported on atrocities committed by Russian forces in Chechnya and on corruption schemes that implicated top officials in the Kremlin. Its correspondents had looked into the possibility that the F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., was behind a series of mysterious apartment bombings that had helped solidify Putin's power."
"That May, days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated to his first term as Russia's President, a high-ranking Kremlin official conveyed a list of demands to NTV. If the channel hoped to survive, the official said, it must end its investigations into corruption in Putin's entourage, abandon its unflinching coverage of the war in Chechnya, and more readily coöperate its editorial policy with the Kremlin."
"In one episode, which had aired a few months earlier, Putin's puppet appeared in the role of Little Zaches, a character from an E. T. A. Hoffmann fairy tale, an allegorical satire of how readily people can be fooled by superficial charmers. Putin was portrayed as an unsightly troll, who, by an act of magic-a spell cast by the puppet version of Boris Berezovsky, the magnate who helped engineer his rise to the Presidency"
NTV was a widely watched, independent Russian channel that produced muckraking coverage of Chechnya atrocities and corruption implicating Kremlin officials. Correspondents investigated the possibility that the F.S.B. was behind mysterious apartment bombings that helped solidify Vladimir Putin's power. Owner Vladimir Gusinsky, an oligarch whose career began with a for-profit worker coöperative, faced governmental threats often disguised as corporate-debt disputes. Days after Putin's first inauguration, a high-ranking Kremlin official delivered demands requiring NTV to end probes into Putin's entourage, abandon its Chechnya reporting, and coordinate editorial policy with the Kremlin. A demand also targeted the satirical puppet show Kukly that mocked Putin.
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