Summary: <p>This is a piece we first ran last September. It's reported by OTM producer Molly Schwartz who until the war in Ukraine started was a fellow on a journalism program in Moscow. Molly’s recounted for us the effects of a bizarre and cumbersome law - one of the many tactics used by the Kremlin to silence dissenting voices. </p> <p>Following widespread protests across Russia last year in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Putin's government has engaged in a wave of crackdowns on dissent, <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/dmitry-gudkov-we-have-a-choice-between-exile-and-jaii/a-57866581">expelling</a> and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-raids-home-detained-open-russia-opposition-group-leader-2021-06-01/">imprisoning</a> opposition leaders, and shutting down <a href="https://cpj.org/2021/07/russian-authorities-ban-investigative-outlet-proekt-as-undesirable-classify-staff-as-foreign-agents/">independent news outlets</a>. They've also, since April 2021, added 30 Russian journalists or news outlets to the government's list of <a href="https://minjust.gov.ru/ru/documents/7755/">"foreign agents."</a> </p> <p>Journalists or news organizations who are labeled as "foreign agents" don't have to to shut down or stop publishing. Instead, they have to jump through various bureaucratic hoops <em>— </em>like reporting all their income and expenses to the Ministry of Justice (to be publicly posted on its website), and, perhaps most Kafkaesque of all, including a 24-word legal disclaimer on top of everything they publish. This includes every article, every advertisement, every tweet, every Instagram story, every response to a friend's comment on social media. </p> <p><em>This is a segment from our September 24th, 2021 program, </em><a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/the-subversion-playbook-on-the-media"><em>The Subversion Playbook</em></a><em>.</em></p>
