Paul Goble
Staunton, Jan. 9 – Vladimir Putin has made control of the media a key element of his political system, but in the last year, not only have Russian state television stations been losing audience but so too have state newspapers. According to the We Can Explain telegram channel “millions” of Russians have stopped reading them in the last year.
The biggest loser in this regard in Moscow’s Komsomolskaya Pravda, long known as Vladimir Putin’s favorite newspaper and a major conduit of his ideas to the population. Over the last 12 months, its daily readership declined from 6.5 million to 4.3 million (t.me/mozhemobyasnit/19690 reposted at ehorussia.com/new/node/32064).
Other media outlets which saw their readership decline include Gazeta.Ru, down 14 percent; RIA Novosty, down by 12 percent, and Lenta.Ru down by 11 percent. The government’s TASS news agency saw the number of its users decline by three percent. And these declines occurred despite the government’s injection of ever more money into this branch.
As a result of this change in the media environment, the Kremlin has lost one of its most important levers of influence on the population and thus is likely to be increasingly persuaded that its best options to get the people to do what it wants are either outright bribes like the bonuses for those who join the military or repression.
Saturday, January 11, 2025
Putin’s Favorite Newspaper Loses Nearly a Third of Its Readers in 2024
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