“The public doesn’t care if you bought it or got it from a source,” said Roman Anin, founder of iStories, a Russian nonprofit investigative website with a team of 15 people. He said he concluded that “since we live in a country where the authorities are killing opposition leaders, let’s forget about these rules, because these stories are more important than our ethical rules. “
This portal to the world of Vladimir Putin opened even with some American journalists covering Russian interference in the 2016 elections by producing overheated essays and viral topics on Twitter. They put Putin, in the American imagination, as an all-powerful puppet master and everyone whose name ends in the letter “v” as their agent. But it was the real Russians, running their sites on the margins of legality or abroad, that opened the windows of Putin’s real Russia. And what they discovered is unbelievable personal corruption, obscure figures behind international political interference and killer, but sometimes inept, security services.
Here are some examples of these revelations:
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The nonprofit investigative agency Proekt identified Putin’s “secret family” and found that the woman linked to the president acquired about $ 100 million in wealth from sources linked to the Russian state.
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IStories used a collection of hacked emails to document how Putin’s ex-son-in-law built a huge fortune with connections to the state.
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Bellingcat, who was founded in London, and the Russian-based Insider identified, by name and photo, the Russian agents who poisoned deserter Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018.
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The media group RBC investigated the political machine behind the troll farm that interfered with elections in the United States.
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Meduza exposed profound corruption in every corner of the Moscow city government, even funeral business.
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Navalny’s foundation flew drones over Putin’s palace, a vast Black Sea estate that Navalny labeled “the world’s biggest bribe” in a scathing and mocking nearly two-hour video he launched on his return to Russia last month . The video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
There is a tendency in parts of the American media now to reflexively criticize the rise of alternative voices and open platforms on social media, seeing them only as vectors of disinformation or tools of Donald J. Trump. Russia is a powerful reminder of the other side of this story, the power of these new platforms to challenge one of the most corrupt governments in the world. That’s why, for example, Navalny was a vocal critic of Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, calling it is an “unacceptable act of censorship”.
The new Russian investigative media is also decidedly connected to the Internet. And a lot of that started with Navalny, a lawyer and blogger who created an investigative style on YouTube that relies more on the platform’s light meme formats than on heavily produced documentaries or investigations from news magazines.
Mr. Navalny does not consider himself a journalist. “We are using investigative journalism as a tool to achieve our political goals,” said his adviser, Ms. Pevchikh. (A convention they don’t follow: getting comments from the target of an investigation.) In fact, your relationship with independent journalists can be complicated. Most are careful to maintain their identity as independent actors, not activists. They criticize him, but they also send him his stories, in the hope that he will promote them to his wide audience, and he publicly criticizes them, in turn, for being too soft on the Kremlin.
The new news outlets also learned from Navalny. Many of them imitated their style on YouTube. And he proved that certain lines can be crossed. Furthermore, everyone undoubtedly benefits from the homogeneity of television networks. Imagine how much YouTube you would watch if the only news channels available were Fox News, Newsmax and OAN.