Of 3.9 million Russian news articles studied, 77 percent were from either a government-owned or government-influenced outlet.


In a study which collected 3.9 million online news articles published between April 1 2013 through March 31 2015 from the top 48 internet-based news outlets in Russia, researchers Andrey Simonov and Justin Rao discovered that a majority came from government-owned and government-influenced sources.

An article was considered influenced if the outlet publishing the piece was owned by an oligarch or someone close to Putin, for example.

Read more in this ProMarket article from 2017.