Coming to Putin's defense at yesterday's news conference in Slovakia were two reporters who belong to the Kremlin press pool. The first was Andrei Kolesnikov, a correspondent for Kommersant, a business newspaper owned by Putin critic Boris Berezovsky. But Kolesnikov just released two books about his time covering Putin that the Kremlin likes.

Kolesnikov challenged Bush, asserting that "it's impossible to call Russia or the U.S. fully democratic" and questioned Bush about the "enormous powers of the security services" in the United States that had resulted in "the private lives of citizens falling under the control of the government."

The second reporter, who questioned Bush's assertion that Russian media are not free, works for Interfax, a news service that often closely hews the state line. He asked Bush "about violations of the rights of journalists in the United States, about the fact that some journalists have been fired."

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While he did not specify what he meant, Russian media several years ago highlighted the cases of a couple U.S. journalists at obscure news organs who lost jobs after criticizing Bush's post-Sept. 11 legislation. Bush noted that whenever reporters are fired in the United States, it is not by the government.

In Russia, on the other hand, Putin's Kremlin used a state-controlled company to take over the only independent television network, NTV. When the ousted NTV journalists started a new channel, TV-6, the state shut it down. When they tried again with a network called TVS, Putin's press minister yanked it off the air and replaced it with a sports channel.

The general manager installed at NTV after the Kremlin takeover was later fired when his coverage of the Moscow theater siege in 2002 angered Putin. Then NTV's most independent remaining hosts, Leonid Parfyonov and Savik Shuster, were taken off the air after the government bristled at their talk shows. Shuster's show was called "Freedom of Speech."

Kolesnikov's predecessor at Kommersant, Yelena Tregubova, was kicked out of the Kremlin press pool because, she said, she would not follow official instructions. She later wrote a tell-all book that peeved the Kremlin. When Parfyonov interviewed her for NTV, the segment was yanked after it had already aired in eastern time zones. When a small bomb exploded outside her apartment door last year, Tregubova fled the country.

If Bush does not trust the Russian press to get the story of yesterday's news conference right, he can at least go to the Kremlin's own Web site. On it was posted a transcript of the joint news conference. Only all of Bush's statements and answers were deleted.

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