Russia has been producing so much bad news of late that a lot of it has passed without notice. The implosion of the Russian currency and the sham trial and questionable sentencing of the Putin opponent Aleksei A. Navalny and his brother Oleg have overshadowed less suspenseful stories — such as the designation of several nongovernmental organizations as “foreign agents,” the departure of the country’s leading economist from his academic post, and new attacks on the remaining scraps of independent media. And those were the latest battles for the hearts, minds and memories of the Russian people.

As the year wrapped up, the cabinet filed a bill in Parliament proposing to create a federally mandated list of the broadcasters to be carried by every cable provider. And the person who would be in charge of compiling that list, according to the bill, is the president of Russia.

Even before this proposal to enshrine in law a total monopoly on broadcasting, the few independent broadcasters left in Russia were already losing their battles for survival. After Dozhd (Rain) TV, the last independent broadcaster that still aspires to a national reach — though it has lost most of its cable and satellite carriers — was forced to abandon its rented studio, it was kicked out of a temporary space; then in December it commenced broadcasting from an apartment. In the Siberian city of Tomsk, TV2, probably the last surviving independent regional broadcaster, went off the air at the end of the year, under pressure from the authorities.

A few days before, in Moscow, Yevgenia Albats, the editor of the last independent print magazine, The New Times, was charged with disobeying the police for ostensibly trying to drive away from an officer who had stopped her car. Ms. Albats says she was stuck in traffic and could not have tried to drive away even if she had wanted to; central Moscow was indeed in gridlock all of that evening. Ms. Albats may face arrest if convicted.