The trope of ‘Russian state propaganda’ in mainstream Western media is a persistent one, especially as of late. This continued focus expresses one’s own loss of control as older cable-news models are in decline, the media landscape becomes more diverse, and various web platforms allow younger savvy users to locate alternative information sources. This kind of repetitive finger-pointing is also simultaneously meant to delegitimize Russia’s foreign-language broadcasting and to explain the support for Putin domestically.

The notion in question relies on a number of related assumptions:

• that Western countries do not have state media;
• that corporate media is impartial;
• that state media cannot feature opposing points of view and is thus inferior to its corporate counterpart;
• that media consumers, the general and even the educated public, are incapable of critically analyzing the information they receive.

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