New trial in Politkovskaya murder

The NYT is reporting that Russia's supreme court has ordered a new trial for four people who had been accused, and found not guilty, of complicity in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist and human rights advocate who had been a vocal critic of the Kremlin's wars in Chechnya:

"In ordering the retrial, the court sided with the prosecution, which argued that there had been procedural violations by the judges and the defense during the original trial, a court spokesman, Pavel Odintsov, said. Other critics, however, including President Dmitri A. Medvedev, cited the prosecution’s errors and unfamiliarity with the jury system, which is relatively new in Russia, in the acquittal."

I wrote an article in Gelf Magazine in 2006, in response to the killing, which argued that journalists should respond to the strategic murder of a journalist anywhere by descending en masse and conducting a thorough, long-term investigation:

"Each future killing of a journalist, when there is any suspicion that it may have been a deliberate attempt to thwart an investigation or silence a critic, should be met with a coordinated, world-wide, well-resourced, intensely publicized investigation that does not conclude, nor leave the front pages, until something like the truth has come out. Like most other decisions, the decision to kill a journalist must involve a calculation of risk and reward. I believe that a more deliberate response from the press, in the form of a predictably well-funded and determined investigation, could alter this calculation."

It's not clear why the Russian government has chosen to reopen the Politkovskaya case; if previous experience is any guide, it's as likely to be for political reasons as it is to be motivated by a desire for justice. In terms of my suggestion for a more coordinated response to the targeted killing of journalists, the progressive magazine In These Times, which still gets delivered to my ex-roommate Reihan, ran an interesting article on the decline of substantive news reporting in the United States:

"It is hardly surprising to learn that the U.S. news media ranked last in its coverage of international hard news, with only 15 percent of stories devoted to international affairs (nearly half of which were about Iraq). Finland’s international coverage is double. Thus, you’ll be even less surprised that the study found Americans are “especially uninformed about international public affairs,” while the Scandinavians emerged as the best informed. What do we excel at? Knowledge of soft news and its stars, like Britney Spears and Mel Gibson. Of those surveyed, 90 percent could identify them, whereas 62 percent didn’t know what the Kyoto Accords are. Americans know less about the world than the Finns, Danes or British because we “consume relatively little news in comparison to populations elsewhere.”"

If major news outlets are finding it difficult to devote space to, say, climate change, I guess sustained reporting on the murder of obscure journalists in dangerous places is going to be a hard sell. Maybe if each major celebrity in the US started dating a reporter from a repressive country?

As the Iran protests have shown, it's often not necessary to kill journalists in order to keep them from reporting on the news; threats and expulsion will usually do quite nicely. But then, with much of the news from Iran now being provided by ordinary people, the definition of "journalist" may be getting more difficult. In These Times had something to say about that too, arguing in the same issue that "citizen reporting" is no substitute for investigations by trained, experienced, full-time journalists. Ironically, the article is not yet available online.

Man, this is a long post! I can't wait until Boris reads it!