For Your Consideration

I haven’t listened to any main stream media in decades!

ARE YOU so desperate to find the good guy you will praise the Authoritarian? No matter who he is?
Putin’s regime has also cracked down hard on the few remaining vestiges of Russia’s free press. The radio station Echo of Moscow went silent on March 1. The next day, the government’s Internet censor, Roskomnadzor, announced it would block any website calling the war an “invasion” or “war”; it proceeded to block 32 sites. Just 48 hours later, a new law passed. Now, if a Russian media outlet or individual calls the war a war or otherwise contradicts Putin’s narrative, they face up to 15 years in jail.
Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the lower house of parliament, said: “[T]his law will force punishment—and very tough punishment—on those who lied and made statements which discredited our armed forces.”
The law prompted the independent tv Rain to immediately pull its plug, and numerous journalists from independent and foreign media began fleeing Russia.
Because of these measures, virtually all remaining media is serving up the same spin to older Russians that schoolteachers are dishing out to the young. “It’s very hard … to find alternative information,” Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova told the bbc on March 17. As a result, she said, most Russians are “zombified” by Putin’s propaganda.
Putin knows controlling the narrative is vital. The average Russian would likely view the violence unleashed on Ukraine differently from Putin’s wars on Chechnya or Syria. In Ukraine, Russians are actually killing brother and sister Slavs, bound to Russia by a thousand-year history and a common religion. Some analysts have predicted that the resulting shame among Russians could be strong enough to bring Putin down.
But because Putin’s propaganda machine is operating in overdrive, any such pressure remains manageable. To Westerners, Ukraine is winning the information war: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is likened to Winston Churchill, and Putin is likened to Adolf Hitler. But inside Russia, Putin is the hero of the story.
For most of his 22 years in power, Putin has been gradually suppressing the press and rewriting aspects of history to sculpt the outlook of his people, augment his control, and attack enemies, domestic and foreign. His earlier measures may have seemed innocuous at the time, but they cleared the way for the current extremes. The result is that the majority of Russians believe and support him.
State-run pollsters show that as many as 71 percent of Russians back Putin’s invasion. Independent agencies still place the figure at 58 percent.
Political scientist Anton Shirikov told the Washington Post that Putin’s efforts have been so successful that many Russians are incapable of believing the truth, even when it’s coming from trusted relatives or friends. “They have this filter,” he said, so “they will just reject it.”
This all adds up to mean that even as Russian casualties rise and the Russian economy is pulverized by economic sanctions, the majority of Russians do not blame Putin. They blame nato and stand behind Putin.
Some Russians pierce the propaganda bubble, learn the shameful truth, and protest the invasion. In late February, significant numbers rallied against the war in cities from Moscow to Vladivostok. These were individuals who accessed unfiltered information and engaged in independent thinking. They called the war a war—unprovoked and unjustifiable. But the demonstrators were summarily arrested. Official Russian data says 3,500 people have been apprehended, but human rights groups in the country say the true number is as high as 13,000.
As the war entered its fourth week, protests dwindled and security measures tightened. A handful of bold Russian citizens adopted a new, more subtle approach: standing in a public place holding up a blank sheet of paper—no words, nothing. Shockingly, even this was too bold a statement for Putin to tolerate. Those Russians, too, were arrested and could spend the next 15 years incarcerated.
a follower (working on it) -Sift through the lies, sift through the propaganda of the world! Do not just blindly follow the funny and ridiculous memes and the many stories that are also lies and or only opinions when you get down to it!