Lazy Western caricatures claiming Russian media is overwhelmingly ‘state-run’ are out of date – the internet is where it’s at now

Western media to inform

If you rely on Western media to inform yourself about Russia, you may think Russians are being brainwashed by the state TV zombie box. But in the real world, there’s been a huge shift online, where content’s largely unregulated.

Of course, a favourite trope of Western analysts is that the Russian press is completely controlled and guided by the state, feeding into a single narrative to convince those both at home and abroad of the Kremlin’s viewpoints. This is often used, for example, to explain away the fact that the pro-Western liberal opposition has such limited support: “They don’t appear on state TV, so people don’t know about them,” is the typical refrain.

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