According to the Saeima-appointed independent media advisory council, a €3,600 fine was assessed on PBK for its cross-border rebroadcasts of ‘non-objective’ news from Ukraine, a transgression that it has been cited for several times during the past year.
Also Autoradio Rezekne came under the sanctions of the media regulatory board, which fined the much smaller programmer a €700 punishment for the same presenting of one-sided news and opinion about the situation in Ukraine.
Earlier this year, the NEPLP shut down rebroadcasts of RTR Rossiya for three months after determining that its reporting on Ukraine was singularly reflecting the Russian Federation’s foreign policy principles in defending military aggression against a sovereign nation that the rest of the democratic world has condemned.
The prime message for which the broadcasting media are being fined is the repeatedly professed opinion that, contrary to international legal norms, the president of Russia has every right to bring in armed forces to Ukraine to ‘protect’ ethnic Russian-speaking residents there in its east.