Mass media in Berdsk announced their closure due to “military censorship”

The news department of the publication “Kurier. Sreda”, which has been working in Berdsk, Novosibirsk region since 2008, announced the closure of the website due to “military censorship”.

According to the editor-in-chief of Galina Komornikova, in March 2022, employees removed all mentions of the word “war” from the website at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office. In the following two years, the editors paid one and a half million rubles in fines for not marking “foreign agent” in the texts. Complaints from Roskomnadzor, the police, the prosecutor’s office, and the FSB came to the editorial office every month, Komornikova noted. “Somehow we received a notification from the prosecutor’s office, I don’t remember which region, that we have the word “war” on our website. I started looking at the text with the word “war” for 2020,” the editor-in-chief said.

In the fall of 2023, the publication turned off monetization in “Yandex.Dzene”, the income from this source fell 40 times. The editorial support service explained that “users’ interests have changed”, it is necessary to “try to make other pictures”. “We tried for two years to live under the conditions of military censorship. Now I can say that it is already unbearable. When the claims come not for violation of strict military restrictions, but simply not the right topic, not the right link, not such a heroization,” wrote Galina Komornikova, noted that the decision to close is “perpetual”.

The newspaper “Kurier” started working in Berdsk in 2003. Five years later, the journalists launched a news site.

• Military censorship appeared in Russia a few days after the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022. In addition to social networks, the Russian authorities have blocked the websites of all independent mass media and most human rights organizations. In the criminal and administrative code, there were articles about so-called fakes about the Russian army and discrediting its actions, which provide, among other things, prison sentences for anti-war positions or reports of war crimes on the part of Russian servicemen.