“The public doesn’t care if you bought data or got it from a source,” said Roman Anin, the founder of iStories, a Russian nonprofit research site with 15 people. He said he had concluded that “since we are in a country where authorities are killing opposition leaders, let’s forget these rules because these stories are more important than our ethical rules.”
That portal to Vladimir Putin’s world has opened even as some American journalists discussing Russia’s interference in the 2016 election produced overheated essays and viral Twitter threads. They cast Mr. Putin, in the American imagination, as an all-powerful puppeteer and anyone whose name ends with the letter “v” as his agent. But it was real Russians, running their websites on the verge of legality or from abroad, who opened windows to Putin’s real Russia. And what they have uncovered is incredible personal corruption, shadowy figures behind international political interference, and murderous but sometimes inept security forces.
Here are a few examples of these revelations:
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The investigative nonprofit Proekt identified Mr Putin’s “ secret family ” and found that the woman he linked to the president had acquired about $ 100 million in wealth from sources linked to the Russian state.
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IStories used a wealth of hacked emails to document how Mr Putin’s former son-in-law made a huge fortune from state connections.
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Bellingcat, which was founded in London, and the Russia-based Insider identified by name and photo the Russian agents who poisoned turncoat Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018.
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The media group RBC delved into the political machinery behind the troll farm that interfered with US elections.
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Meduza exposed deep corruption in every corner of the Moscow city government, right down to the funeral sector.
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Mr. Navalny’s foundation flew by drones over Mr. Putin’s palace, a sprawling Black Sea estate that Mr. Navalny called ‘the greatest bribe in the world’ in a devastating, nearly two-hour video he took last. month on his return to Russia. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.
There is currently a tendency in parts of the American media to reflexively denounce the emergence of alternative voices and open social media platforms, viewing them solely as vectors for misinformation or Donald J. Trump tools. Russia is a powerful reminder of the other side of that story, the power of these new platforms to challenge one of the world’s most corrupt governments. That’s why, for example, Mr. Navalny was an outspoken critic of Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, calling it is an “unacceptable act of censorship”.
The new Russian research media are also resolutely off the Internet. And a lot of it started with Mr. Navalny, a lawyer and blogger who created a YouTube research style that draws more from that platform’s lightweight, meme-y formats than from heavily produced documentaries or news magazine investigations.
Mr. Navalny does not set herself up as a journalist. “We use investigative reporting as a tool to achieve our political ends,” said his assistant, Ms. Pevchikh. (One convention they don’t follow: getting comment from the target of an investigation.) Indeed, his relationship with the independent journalists can be complicated. Most make sure to maintain their identity as independent actors, not activists. They criticize him, but also send him their stories, hoping that he will promote them to his own general public, and he in turn publicly criticizes them for being too soft for the Kremlin.
The new news broadcasts also heard from Mr. Navalny. Many of them have imitated his style on YouTube. And he proved that certain lines could be crossed. Moreover, they all undoubtedly benefit from the homogeneity of the television networks. Imagine how much YouTube you would watch if the only news channels available were Fox News, Newsmax and OAN.