Five years more rendered to NTV

Creations of the Yevgeny Kiselev team will remain with us for next five years. Yesterday, it became known that the Press Ministry had prolonged broadcasting licence of Russian NTV television company. The fact that some legal violations in the TV company’s activity were registered turned out to be not enough to deprive NTV of the licence. This was the opinion of the Federal Competition Commission made at a special sitting devoted to this question. The version about possible depriving of the license appeared in mass media after a Sunday broadcasting of Leonid Parfenov’s Namedni programme, where, in particular, the question was about a new book of Stroub Talbott. The topic is said to have excited anger in Boris Yeltsin’s surrounding and in the Kremlin. As if namely this fact, but not some violations, could have caused depriving NTV of the licence. Moreover, the Federal Competition Commission said that they could not exclude the NTV frequency being exposed for competition. Though, of course, that were only talks. Finally, press minister Mikhail Lesin called journalists to not searching for some political basis in the fact of the licence prolongation, because his ministry cared only the law observance. The NTV workers sighed with relief and thanked the out-of-politics minister.

Sergei Yugov PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Vera Solovieva

Read the original in Russian: http://www.pravda.ru/main/2002/06/03/42163.html