TV Rain Editor-in-Chief Flees Russia

TIKHON DZYADKO, EDITOR IN CHIEF, TV RAIN: And, yes, things changed very fast. In two hours after — in two hours after our interview, we received information there that police was planning to come to our office and raid it. Unfortunately — fortunately, this information was not confirmed. But still, to me, and to a lot of my colleagues, it was the time when we decided that it’s time to leave the country, because it’s not safe to be there anymore. And now, 10 days after it or a week after it, I think that it was the right decision. Now it’s not safe to be there for us. There was adopted these new law on so-called fake news about Russian army, about Russian soldiers, which is an act of military censorship, which means that we are not allowed to say anything which is not approved by the Ministry of Defense, and which means that we are not allowed to work normally in our country anymore. So now me and my colleagues, a lot of them are abroad, and we are trying to figure out how to live further, how to work, how to do things. And I hope that, in a few days or in a few weeks, we will get used to it and we will start something new.

AMANPOUR: OK. Well, I’m going to come back to you on that, because the big question is, what alternative information from the state do Russians have? So, Danny, you were working in Myanmar. Then there was the coup a year ago, and you spent six months, if I’m not mistaken, in the Insein jail. That’s inside Myanmar, Burma. What was that like for you? Why did they jail you?

DANNY FENSTER, EDITOR AT LARGE, FRONTIER MYANMAR: Well, there was a similar crackdown, I think, on independent media. A lot of newsrooms were getting raided. There were similar laws. I mean, it’s almost like they’re sharing a playbook, but similar laws started coming down that certain words were being banned. You couldn’t call what the military had just done a coup. It was obviously a coup. And it just echoes what they’re doing with the term war right now in Russia. But I think it was part of a general crackdown on media. My name was on a document at a previous news outlet that I had been editing it. I think they swept — they raided that newsroom and found my name on the document. And, frankly, I think it was a little bit of incompetence. I don’t think they knew what they were looking for. They just wanted anybody at that organization. And so they found me as I was boarding a plane and detained me.