Mikhail Zygar’s questions were sharper than those of the others, who headed back to spacious television studios while Zygar broadcast his piece from a Moscow living room. The Dozhd news channel, whose editor in chief, Zygar, was given a Committee to Protect Journalists award last month, rose to prominence in 2011 with its coverage of the mass protests against Vladimir Putin, who was then prime minister but preparing to return to the presidency. Putin’s government has been careful not to order the channel to shut down, but a Kremlin-instigated smear campaign has driven this rare independent broadcaster to the brink of demise. Past strollers and bicycles in the hall, a Soviet-era apartment in central Moscow now houses the studio of Dozhd, whose combined online and TV audience is about 12 million. Lobkov spent most of his television career on NTV, a renowned channel taken over by state-controlled gas company Gazprom in 2001, a move that forced independent journalists to flee. [...] at Dozhd, Lobkov says he’s reliving the same pressure and harassment campaign he experienced at NTV when “all tools of the government were used.” During Putin’s 15 years in power, the Russian television landscape has been sanitized to the point where news coverage on all channels is almost identical.