The ministry had ordered the Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corporation (MNVK), which held the license, to stop broadcasting as the liquidation order came into force, officials said.

TV-6 reporters and other prominent journalists protested the decision, which threatens to replace one of Russia's major television channels with a blank screen, in an on-air conference in the Moscow Echo radio station.

"This makes me sick. I don't know if one can force a blank screen on a television channel, but the very idea that someone would want to do that is simply foul," prominent journalist Vladimir Pozner fumed.

"I think that this is a unique incident, when a whole channel stops broadcasting. This violates the rights of their audiences, and this black hole is actually a hole in our democratic practice," complained Yasen Zasursky, dean of the journalism college in Moscow's State University.

However, rights activist Alexei Simonov suggested that the authorities would try to avoid having a blank screen in place of the TV-6, but would attempt to tie the outspoken reporters down.

"They will merely try to hang a few swords above their heads and make the team feel completely defenseless, so that they begin to do stupid things," Simonov told the Moscow Echo radio.

The TV-6 team said they suspected the decision was the Kremlin's retaliation against the rebel reporters, who had battled the state for the independence of national NTV broadcaster and left NTV for TV-6 after they lost.

"For a year we have been in the position of whipping boys. All we did was work our way, and that provoked this horrible reaction," reporter Yelena Kurlyandtseva said.

The state-owned giant Gazprom took over NTV in April as Russian President Vladimir Putin waged a war against Russia's so-called oligarchs, powerful businessmen whose fortunes were made in the unbridled free-for-all of the perestroika.

However, "(the Kremlin's war against) oligarchs is not important any more. It is we who are being destroyed," TV-6's show host Svetlana Sorokina echoed.

The team would still compete for the broadcasting license, the company's director and TV-6 show host Yevgeny Kiselyov assured.

Earlier, Media and Press Minister Mikhail Lesin said in a television interview that the TV-6 team's chances of winning the license would be "very high."

The company had been 75 percent owned by Boris Berezovsky, a powerful tycoon and former Kremlin insider who has become one of Putin's harshest critics.

Last week, the top arbitration court in Russia ordered the channel to be wound up on the grounds that it is bankrupt.

The ruling, instigated by minority shareholder partly state-owned LUKoil, provoked protests at home and abroad that the Kremlin was seeking to crack down on the free media and silence any criticism on the airwaves after the state-backed takeover of another private channel, NTV, last April.

Last Tuesday, journalists at TV-6 parted ways with Berezovsky to form "OOO TV-6" in an effort to save the embattled station.

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