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Lombardi says he does not want to "jump over" the established chain of command, which requires him to report to the office of the Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's No. 2 man and an exponent of the conspiracy-against-the-Pope perspective on the crisis. During a 30-minute interview in his modest, book-cluttered office just off St. Peter's Square, Lombardi stuck to the official line about Ratzinger's role in the Munich transfer, saying "it was normal" that the assigning of priests - even those with serious problems - was handled by deputies without...
...networks, all of which are controlled by the government or state-owned companies, stayed with their regularly scheduled programming as the tragedy unfolded, waiting for up to two hours to provide their first substantive reports on the attacks, which killed at least 39 people. Bloggers and political commentators say the slow response of the networks - Channel One, Rossia 1 and NTV - is indicative of the state of television journalism in Russia today: the major broadcasters have been so cowed by the Kremlin over the past decade, they're incapable of effectively covering events of vital national importance. (See pictures...
...other networks were even more delayed. State-owned Rossia 1 broadcast a short news report about an hour after the bombers struck, followed by a documentary about a famous folk singer and a police drama. NTV, which was once the benchmark for Russian television journalism and is now controlled by the state-owned gas giant Gazprom, was last to report on the bombings at 10 a.m. - a full two hours after the first blast. The story came "as soon as [the channel] had video footage from the scene of the tragedy," network spokeswoman Maria Bezborodova said in an e-mail...
...networks' coverage said news anchors could have at least advised viewers to refrain from taking the notoriously packed Moscow subway, particularly when it was unclear if there could be subsequent attacks. Russians increasingly rely on television for this type of information - according to a 2006 survey by the state-friendly polling agency VTsIOM, in fact, 85% of people prefer to get their news from the TV. But in the network vacuum of information Monday, millions of Russians turned to the Internet or radio for news on the bombings instead. (Read: "Moscow Bombings: Are Islamist Rebels Behind Them...
...Anna Kachkayeva, a professor at Moscow State University and television critic with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, says the reluctance of the networks to broadcast breaking coverage of Monday's attacks was only partially due to the pressure they feel to produce reporting acceptable to the Kremlin. She says the art of live coverage has also disappeared in the past 10 years as news broadcasts have become more and more scripted. "There just aren't very many people around anymore who can do live television," Kachkayeva says...