This is a very interesting article about how the Western mainstream media got a completely inadequate picture of the Russian intellectual field. You can Google translate the article, the link is here.
I give the extract of the annotation:
The course towards isolating Russia from the “collective West” that emerged in the mid-2010s led to an interesting result. Cultural and information exchange with the Russian Federation has become noticeably more complicated, and the Russian socio-political system and cultural life have begun to be reshaped “in their own way” or plunged into self-reflection, increasingly moving away from the problems discussed by residents of Europe and America.
By 2022, between Russia and what Putin in 2000 called the “civilized world” (in isolation from which he did not imagine his country at that time), what had formed was not an iron curtain, but a Gesellian mirror – with mirror glass on one side and darkened on the other.
The mirror side is turned inward to Russia and reflects the efforts of the authorities to isolate themselves from the West, replacing narratives coming from outside with a “domestic product” and satisfying the need for a “window to Europe” through its demonization by propaganda. Foreign journalists and cultural figures are forced to look in the dark direction, trying to decipher what is happening “behind the glass” and package the results of their observations into a form accessible to their audience.
And this packaging sometimes so modifies the image of the Russian Federation familiar to the Russian-speaking public that some other country is delivered to the West by “parallel export”. It is useful to understand what kind of country this is, because the “civilized world” will sooner or later rebuild relations with this “other Russia” (which he himself invented).
https://old.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/1dxp2zg/mordorland_how_western_journalists_and_writers/
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The userbase here is diverse, so to clarify some things here, when they criticize “Western journalism” they do not count Eastern Europe as part of the West. This can be confusing as for much of the Global South, when they speak about the West, Eastern Europe is implied. However, the concept of “Western” depends on the context.
At its widest understanding Western is a shorthand for wealthy, educated, industrialized, democratic countries, so it includes Japan, South Korea and Taiwan who are not even geographically in the West (as agreed upon on what 0 Meridian line is). At its narrowest, it’s just a synonym for the US. In this particular case, they are defining the West as Western Europe and Anglo countries.
Novaya Gazeta is an award-winning investigative Russian newspaper against Russian government that currently operates from Latvia. It provides Eastern European views on Russia.