Uncomfortable about TASS move

I felt a little uncomfortable reading about Reuters dumping TASS. Where does Reuters stand on the mouthpieces of other dictatorial regimes?

I don’t know the arrangements in the newswire business these days, but when I was working for the Baron a couple of decades ago KCNA and Xinhua were available to third parties through Reuters. If they are still distributed through Reuters, where do you draw the line?

I’m as appalled as the next guy at the atrocities by Putin’s people, but the comrades in North Korea and China have done their share over the years too. And those wires have been their loudspeakers - except no-one in the free world would take their words at face value anyway. In fact, whatever the Dear Great Leader says through KCNA can be, and has been, used against him. Remember all those KCNA pick-ups?

So, in my view, dropping TASS boils down to merely preventing a few cents from flowing into TASS’s coffers at the cost of making Reuters vulnerable to accusations that it is abandoning universal support of free speech. And, why give the dictators a reason to justify their urge to purge the Western media from their turf? ■