“The audience does not care if you bought data or obtained it from a source,” said Roman Anin, the founder of iStories, a non-profit Russian research site with a staff of 15. He said he had come to the conclusion that ‘since we are in a country where authorities are killing opposition leaders, let us forget these rules, because these stories are more important than our ethical rules. ‘
Vladimir Putin’s world portal has opened up, even though some American journalists covering Russian interference in the 2016 election have produced overheated essays and viral Twitter threads. They throw mr. Putin in the American imagination as an almighty puppet master and everyone whose name in the letter ‘v’ ends as his agent. But it was real Russians who operated their websites on the side of legality or from abroad, who opened windows to Mr. Putin’s true Russia has opened up. And what they have discovered is incredible personal corruption, shady figures behind international political interference and murderous but sometimes inappropriate security services.
Here are some examples of these revelations:
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The investigative profit target Project has Mr. Putin’s ‘secret family’ identified and found that the woman he linked to the president obtained about $ 100 million in wealth from sources linked to the Russian state.
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IStories has used a bunch of hacked emails to document how Putin’s former son-in-law built up a huge fortune from state connections.
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Bellingcat, based in London, and the Russian-based insider, identified on Russian agents the name of the Russian agents who poisoned offender Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018.
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The media group RBC went into the political machinery behind the troll farm interfering in US elections.
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Meduza has exposed deep corruption in all corners of the Moscow city government to the funeral home.
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The establishment of mr. Navalny has drones over Mr. Putin’s palace flew, a large estate on the Black Sea that Mr. Navalny described it as “the biggest bribe in the world” in a shocking, ridiculous video of almost two hours he released on his return to Russia last month. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
There is currently a tendency in parts of the American media to reflexively reject the emergence of alternative voices and open platforms on social media and see them only as vectors for misinformation or instruments of Donald J. Trump. Russia is a powerful reminder on the other side of the story, the power of these new platforms to challenge one of the world’s most corrupt governments. Therefore, Mr. Navalny, for example, is an outspoken critic of Twitter’s decision to oust Mr. To ban Trump, calling it is an “unacceptable censorship action.”
The new Russian investigative media is also resolutely off the internet. And a lot of it started with mr. Navalny, a lawyer and blogger who has created a style of YouTube investigation that draws more from the lightweight, meme-y formats of the platform than from heavily-produced documentaries or newsletter investigations.
Mr. Navalny is not a journalist. “We use investigative reporting as a tool to achieve our political goal,” said his assistant, Ms. Pevchikh, said. (One convention they do not follow: commenting on the target of an investigation.) His relationship with the independent journalists can indeed be complicated. Most are careful to maintain their identity as independent actors, not as activists. They criticize him, but also send a message to their stories, hoping he will promote it to his own large audience, and he criticizes them in public because they are too gentle with the Kremlin.
The new newspapers also reported on Mr. Navalny learned. Many of them have imitated his style on YouTube. And he proved that certain lines could be crossed. In addition, they undoubtedly benefit from the homogeneity of the television networks. Imagine how much YouTube you would watch if Fox News, Newsmax and OAN were the only news channels available.