Russia/Media criticism on Western media/The case of the new corruption report

Pravda: Western mass media get into the mess with Russian corruption

"We are used to the fact that Western media outlets may frequently disregard the rules of elementary journalistic ethics, portraying the poor state of things in Russia. There were no doubts that a new report from Georgy Satarov's Indem Foundation "About the increase of corruption over four years" would become the central subject of discussion in foreign press. This is exactly what happened, in a classic form: the truth of the figures was not called into question at all, in spite of the fact that many Russian experts pointed out the inadequacy of numbers in the research."

"However, obvious discrepancies and the unanimous opinion of the Russian expert community did not confuse the Western press. The Independent, The Guardian and Financial Times synchronously published their "horrible Russian corruption" stories. "Massive scale of corruption in Russia revealed" (The Independent); "Cost of bribes soars as Russia's millionaire bureaucratsrake in profits" (The Guardian); "Bribery in Russia up tenfold to $316bn in four years" (Financial Times)."

"On the one hand, it has all become rather boring. Any negative information from Russia is presented in the Western society as the ultimate truth. Western mass media beat Soviet television at this point: Soviet news reports about events in the Western community were filled with messages about natural disasters, poverty and unemployment."

"Traditions of the Western press and its standards are often pictured as the model of journalism, which implies the many-sided coverage of any problem. Where does their celebrated objectivism go when they report about Russia? Don't they have their own specialists on Russia? Or maybe they do not have a calculator to calculate Russian macroeconomic indexes and compare them with results of Indem's report?"