On December 3, the Astrakhan Region's Governor's Office issued a tender for monitoring media reports on the region's authorities' activities. EUR 6,362 will be allocated from the budget for this.
According to the terms of reference, at least 10,000 federal media, 12,000 publications from the CIS and Baltic countries, 16,500 foreign sources, and at least 3,000 blogs will be monitored.
Separately, it is written that the winner must monitor the tapes of the state publications TASS, RIA Novosti, and Sputnik, the Kremlin news agency, whose editor-in-chief is Margarita Simonyan, who also heads the RT television channel. The manager of the governor of the Astrakhan region emphasized that officials are interested in Sputnik services in Arab countries, China, and Spain.
The terms of reference also list the mandatory Russian television programs for monitoring. Among them is Pozner, which, as journalist Vladimir Pozner himself stated, was removed from the broadcast network after the start of the war in Ukraine. On Channel One's [ed. Russian state-controlled TV channel "Pervyy kanal"] website, the weekly program's last episodes are on February 21 and then on October 4.
