It’s fascinating to watch the fall-out of the recent arrest and expulsion of the hapless alleged American spy Ryan C. Fogle in the Russian media, in at least the degree to which we can see just how important of an institution Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine has become.  Leaving aside for a moment all the unknowable questions about Fogle’s incomprehensible story, the Foglegate incident illustrates an approach by the Kremlin to defamation media that now has a discordant resonance on social media platforms, where they hold much less control.  As observed by Timothy Heritage on Reuters, “the Kremlin can manipulate state television, the main source for news for a large majority of Russians from the Baltic to the Pacific, it does not control the Internet and social media sites.  Not only have the Internet and such sites been used to spread word of anti-Putin protests by liberals and middle-class voters fearing political and economic stagnation under him, Volodin’s ability to get to grips with new media is not clear.”

However the state media in Russian can never be simply discarded.  It produces far too much content, employs far too many real journalists, and is not solely dedicated to the promotion of the state’s interest but also to the collection and presentation of facts about what is happening inside the country.  Writing on Vedomosti, Ilya Klishin takes a closer look at the complex picture of state media in Russia today (with a hasty English translation from us).