On state TV channels, the media outlets with the biggest audiences in Russia, there has been minimal coverage of Navalny’s death, and the first reports were largely slow to come and perfunctory.
On social media, however, it is quite a different picture. Posts on Navalny were among the most viewed, garnering hundreds of thousands - sometimes over a million - views, in hours.
And while Navalny’s team says it has not yet confirmed the news, many prominent figures sympathetic to his cause voiced incredulity and sadness.
“If this is true, then, regardless of the formal reason, Vladimir Putin personally bears responsibility for the premature death,” Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former Russian oligarch turned Putin critic, wrote on Telegram. Other opposition figures echoed those remarks.
Mhh, I wonder why. Their state controlled media is otherwise so diverse and always shows both sides of the truth. /s
It is interesting that there is so much in social media though. Shows how putin was not yet able to clamp down on online speech like Xi is already able to. But Putin is already cutting cords off the internet and is at least surveilling the internet. The next step will be deleting and hiding things people from russian IP adresses posted when the infrastructure hardware from Xi arrives.
There’s a good reason why support for Putin vs Navalny isn’t a rural vs urban thing but a getting news from TV vs the internet thing (contrary to most countries with freedom of the press).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Russian state media tend not to give much or any airtime to critics of the government, and their initial treatment of Alexei Navalny’s reported death continues in this vein.
On state TV channels, the media outlets with the biggest audiences in Russia, there has been minimal coverage of Navalny’s death, and the first reports were largely slow to come and perfunctory.
When a liberal politician appearing on another popular state TV channel tried to express his condolences on Navalny’s death, he was cut off by the programme’s host, who asked him what this had to do with the topic they were discussing.
“I won’t even begin to explain to them that everyone has long forgotten [Navalny], that there was no point in killing him, especially before the elections, that it would be beneficial to completely opposite forces,” she said.
Channel One presenter Anatoly Kuzichev also claimed Navalny had been “safely forgotten even by his associates”, and speculated that his death may have been “an accident” or perhaps an act of “terrible sabotage”.
In a similar vein, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested there was something “self-revealing” about the swiftness of Western leaders’ response.
The original article contains 467 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!