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.
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.
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