"As many as 3,200 television and radio companies have been registered and are operating in Russia and only 10% of them are state-run entities," the President said in an interview with the US television company CBS for the 60 Minutes program.
"Even if the authorities would like to control at the federal or regional level this huge number of mass media sources and people who work in this sphere, we cannot but understand that this is actually impossible," Putin told Mike Wallace, the anchor of 60 Minutes.
According to Putin, in order to make the mass media independent, "it is necessary to create conditions for their economic independence so that they can be independent from the state and from large or oligarchic groups as they are called in Russia because they protect their group rather than national interests."
In an interview with France 3 Television Company, Vladimir Putin said "the rumors about the demise of democracy in Russia are strongly exaggerated." According to the Russian president, "democracy does not mean all-out permissiveness and anarchy while transition to a market economy must not be accompanied by the impoverishment of millions of people and the concentration of billions in the hands of two or three persons, moreover, in a way that contradicts the effective legislation."
On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the victory in WWII, the President of Russia gave an unprecedented series of numerous interviews with foreign mass media and answered a total of 120 questions.
