From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

As the global spotlight fixes on Sochi this weekend, the Russian government is crushing dissent.

And there's a lot of it.

As the committee to protect journalists,, Notes in a New Report,

people there have suffered long-lasting power outages,

contaminated water or no water at all,

and eviction if their home stood in the way of Olympic construction.

They've been victim to widespread violations of labor laws

and witness to corruption in the form of illegal building

permits for the wealthy, unrelated to the games. To quash the complaints, the authorities have

denied several political activists the spectator passes they need to enter sporting venues,

where they might meet foreign reporters, and they've jailed environmental activists, one on the pretext of swearing in public.

The local media, meanwhile, have been conscripted to do public relations for the government,

says Nina Ogianova of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

National television stations and news agencies receive their directives from the central authorities,

as well as from the municipal authorities and the directives to cover the Sochi Olympics the way that media would cover a deceased person,

either in positive light or not at all.

Give me examples of how stories were spiked or changed in order to reflect this directive.

In one incident, a journalist working for a major news agency in Sochi told us that her editors in Moscow completely rejected three stories that she pitched

to them. The first story had to do with a local journalist who was incarcerated on false

...