"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. "Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions..." Gore Vidal

“What’s happened in Russia would be like Fox News taking over the airwaves in the U.S., booting MSNBC from cable TV, and reducing liberals to broadcasting online from a small private apartment in Brooklyn,” Klishin said.

A little over a year ago, Svetlana Mironyuk was one of the most influential figures in the Russian media. She was editor in chief of RIA Novosti, a Soviet-era news agency, which she transformed into a sophisticated, modern, and influential digital behemoth . . She hired a number of popular, influential journalists from liberal media outlets, and her website carried live reports from anti-Putin protests in Moscow during the winter of 2012. Yet Mironyuk was able to preserve a good relationship with the Kremlin. In September 2013, for instance, RIA Novosti hosted Putin’s annual, high-profile Valdai Conference, with Mironyuk on stage introducing the Russian president. But by December 2013, Mironyuk, suddenly, was out. RIA Novosti was shut down by the Kremlin, then reorganized as part of a new agency headed by a Kremlin-friendly broadcaster known for his high-voltage on-air presence and frequent rants against the West. Mironyuk eventually left Russia.

Last November, I met with her at a coffee shop in New York. . . If anyone understands how the Russian press operates, it is Mironyuk. And when we spoke, she was adamant that the perception in the West that the people running Russia’s media outlets are Soviet-style ideologues is wrong. They have no ideology, she said. “It’s control, control, control. The only strategy they all have is ‘whatever it takes.’ No ideology. No strategy. No new approach, no understanding. No, no, no! They are struggling for influence on Putin, for being closer to him.”. . . .In the Soviet Union, she explained, at least there were rules. Now, in Russia, “there are no rules. You never know where you step and what can happen and what, yesterday, was not a mistake or breaking the rules, it can be tomorrow.”

The war in Ukraine has sent Russian domestic TV ratings soaring. Federal channels have increased their news lineups—a half hour, then an hour, and now two hours. The programming has paid off in popularity for Putin; a poll in March by the Levada Center found that 83 percent of Russians trust the president. Yet some Russian journalists question whether that mood can last. “The level of propaganda is so disgusting that people who earlier believed in it now are beginning to doubt it,” TV Dozhd’s Sindeyeva told me. “This propaganda has begun to do its thing, to unite people around a certain idea that the country has risen from its knees and is strong. But right now, they have made the propaganda so coarse, so clumsy, that people have begun to doubt it.” She claimed to have seen data showing a decline in the public’s belief in the accuracy of news on Russian TV, “and that is the first sign that trust is going to drop.” Sindeyeva recalled how, during Soviet times, many people completely lost faith in what they read and what they saw, becoming cynical experts in “reading between the lines” of propaganda.