I am reminded by a recent exchange that the party line in the West is that the Russian media are uniformly pro-Putin. This is not true.
The three national TV channels generally follow the Kremlin line. Some political shows have closed, which is a shame. However, this is not true of the print media. The print media are controlled by various business groups and/or political factions. E.g. Sovetskaya Rossiya is the newspaper of the Communist Party. Zavtra is ultra-nationalist. Novaya Gazeta is anti-Putin to the point of psychosis. Kommersant is owned by Boris Berezovsky. If you want confirmation of this, simply go to their respective websites and, assuming you can't read Russian, Babelfish a couple of articles. They will read like Dadaist poetry, but you will get the idea. The two widest-circulation papers in Russia, Argumenty i Fakty and Komsomolskaya Pravda, are at www.aif.ru and www.kp.ru, respectively. Novaya Gazeta's often-bizarre ramblings are at http://www.novayagazeta.ru/. Kommersant, which I guess the Kremlin just forgot to shut down, is at http://www.kommersant.ru/. Indeed, Kommersant has an English-labguage website, which may or may not have different content than the main one. I haven't checked. http://www.kommersant.com/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
