Despite Kremlin efforts, Russian indie media keep news flowing
Under the pressure of war, crackdown, and emigration, Russia’s media landscape looks increasingly as it did in the bygone Soviet era.
In the Cold War, that meant a consolidated national press offering the official narrative with little political diversity, and a range of alternative voices based outside the country trying various means to penetrate official obstacles to reach Russian audiences.
It’s not quite that bad yet today.
The funding for state media has indeed tripled since the war began, even as laws to curtail critical journalism have proliferated. And most independent media – and the journalists who worked with them – have left Russia in recent months after being declared “foreign agents,” forbidden from reporting on the war and, in many cases, physically shut down by authorities.
