On 3 March, the last remaining independent TV channel in Russia, Dozhd – or TV Rain in English – stopped broadcasting. Over the past year, journalists’ few remaining freedoms in Russia have been evaporating, with the censors tightening their iron grip, and last week they finally reached their ultimate goal. This sounds dramatic, but I believe that the era of independent media in Russia has ended. The free press is officially and legally over for now.
I hosted a news show on Dozhd called Here and Now. We’ve been broadcasting since 2010, and we’ve been through tough times before. During the poisoning and later arrest of Alexei Navalny – and the subsequent protests – in 2020 and 2021, we totalled 1.1bn views through our streaming and YouTube channels. Despite being thrown out of the Kremlin journalist pool, and being branded “a foreign agent” by the justice ministry, we were proud to stay on air and reach millions during those historic times.
