Nooooo....
That article is lazy excuse for journalism at best, and propaganda piece at worst.
First off, it's a story that wasn't verified. You've got a guy who tells a story. Serious journalism used to reject those. That would be the same if I walked in the Independent office and told them there's a building in Guangzhou where cows play chess. Where in St. Petersburg is that building, if it is in St. Petersburg? You have a guy who worked in there, doesn't he know where he worked? It can't be for protection, his name is mentioned. Why there aren't any pictures of the building, instead of a few large and ominous pictures of Putin? Why didn't a journalist check the location out?
Secondly, what's the point? Do you know how many million articles are on the internet and how many millions comment on them daily? A few hundred people, even if each writes a 135 comments daily, are nothing compared to those. A drop in the ocean is a fair comparison.
Imagine that, instead of Russia and internet, the article was about 800 people who are bent on polluting the world by lining up on a beach and peeing in the ocean every day. Someone would get fired.
It would make much more sense, and would be much more believable if it revealed that governments influence and/or pay journalist and popular online sources of information quite often, but that's pretty much known already.
That article is the perfect example of propaganda piece - lots of malarkey, very little substance, lack of anything concrete in it, and a couple of pictures of Putin to set the readers in the right mood while they're reading it.
Bookmarks