MOSCOW, March 10 (UPI) -- The chief of Moscow's only independent news radio station lives daily with mysterious anonymous telephone calls, The Times of London said Wednesday.
Aleksei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy, told the newspaper his most recent call from a stranger was Saturday, on his private, unlisted number at home.
"He told me to think about my family, to think about my son, to think about what I was doing," Venediktov said.
He said he is under increasing pressure to censor his hard-hitting reports in the run-up to the presidential election on March 14.
President Vladimir Putin, running for a second term, has already re-established state control over all television networks in the four years since he took over from Boris Yeltsin.
Paradoxically, Venediktov apparently enjoys close relations with various Kremlin officials. Recently he met Dmitri Medvedev, Putin's chief of staff.
"I simply told him that we are a commercial radio station, and we need to increase our ratings and to sell advertising," he said.
The station has about 500,000 listeners in Moscow and two million in the rest of the country, a drop in the bucket compared with state-run media.
