Journalists In Russia Worry About Criticizing Sochi Olympics In Fear Of Consequences

Why Journalists Are Afraid To Cover Sochi Olympics
RETRANSMISSION OF MOSB110 FILE In this Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010 file photo, Russian journalist Mikhail Beketov who has extensively covered the Khimki forest dispute and was brutally beaten in 2008, is seen during a rally on Pushkin Square to support journalists and activists and demand full investigation into their beatings in central Moscow, Russia. Mikhail Beketov, a Russian journalist who lost a leg and was left brain-damaged after a brutal assault that followed his campaigns against a highway project outside Moscow, has died on Monday, April 8, 2013. He was 55. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, file)
RETRANSMISSION OF MOSB110 FILE In this Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010 file photo, Russian journalist Mikhail Beketov who has extensively covered the Khimki forest dispute and was brutally beaten in 2008, is seen during a rally on Pushkin Square to support journalists and activists and demand full investigation into their beatings in central Moscow, Russia. Mikhail Beketov, a Russian journalist who lost a leg and was left brain-damaged after a brutal assault that followed his campaigns against a highway project outside Moscow, has died on Monday, April 8, 2013. He was 55. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel, file)

Last April, Russian journalist Mikhail Beketov, who had exposed corruption in the construction of a highway linking Moscow to St. Petersburg, died of injuries sustained in a brutal beating he had received years earlier.

Beketov’s case made international headlines, but it was hardly an isolated episode in Russia, where a growing climate of repression of investigative journalism has left many reporters with a difficult choice between self-censorship and doing their job at serious personal risk.

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