There was an interesting article this week in the New Yorker magazine by David Remnick. David Remnick is now the editor of the New Yorker. But previously he was the Washington Post bureau chief in Moscow and wrote Lenin's Tomb, probably the best book on Russia during Perestroika. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_remnick)

The article, entitled tellingly, Echo in the Dark, details the work of Eko Moskvi (Echo of Moscow), the leading "oppositionist" radio station in Moscow. He details how Eko Moskvi is one of the few independent voices left in Putin's Russia.

It has been well-documented how Putin has systematically limited free press in Russia and seized control, directly and indirectly, of all television stations. Additionally, numerous journalists have been murdered in Russia during the past decade.

The article details the threats, hidden and overt, that the editors of Eko Moskvi face each day to keep reporting news in Putin's Russia. Most recently, the editor was upbraided by Putin himself for the station's reporting on the invasion of Georgia.

After reading the article, I became curious to find more info about Eko Moskvi. I first went to their web site, http://echo.msk.ru, which does have quite a lot of outspoken commentary about Putin's Russia.

I then asked one of our editors if they knew who owned Eko Moskvi. After a bit of research, we were able to find that Eko Moskvi, the lone voice of independent media, is in fact owned by Gazprom Media, the media arm of the Russian gas company that is very close to the Kremlin. (http://www.gazprom-media.com/radio.xml)

All of which made me question even more the independence of Eko Moskvi and the nature of free press in Russia.