Thirty-one years ago this week, on 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré journalist who wrote for Radio Free Europe, BBC and Deutsche Welle, was assaulted in broad daylight on London’s Waterloo Bridge. Markov’s murder happened during the Cold War, but in more recent years the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and of numerous other [...]

Miro Dobrovodsky passed away on July 23, 2009.  FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, March 25, 2009, San Francisco –  Miro Dobrovodsky, one of the best journalists who came to the U.S. from Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War to escape media censorship in their native countries, sent me an email pointing out that the process of [...]

FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, March 16, 2009, San Francisco — BBC has recently made some reductions in its Russian-language radio broadcasts, but unlike the Voice of America (VOA), the British public broadcaster did not completely eliminate radio programs to Russia. The termination of VOA radio to Russia, which occurred last July, just 12 [...]

 FreeMediaOnline.org and Free Media Online Blog  November 5, 2008, San Francisco – The worldwide press freedom organization, Reporters Without Borders, has sent a letter to President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev appealing to him to intervene after the National Broadcasting Council announced it planned to take three foreign radios stations off the FM band by 2009. They [...]

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog  The Federalist Commentary, October 16, 2008, San Francisco – “May you live in interesting times.” No one knows with certainty if this proverb is a famous Chinese curse or not.  However, one can certainly accept the fact that these times are indeed interesting…meaning troubled…in many spheres including economics and international [...]