Putin Samizdat, Shari’s Secret Weapon, MSNBC on Autopilot

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, presenting the latest news from Puck.

Today, Julia Ioffe returns with a captivating portrait of public sentiment inside Russia, from the other side of Putin’s informational iron curtain, where state propaganda is omnipresent and even the best polling is notoriously difficult to interpret.

Plus, below the fold, Dylan Byers reports on how MSNBC is already losing its way without Maddow anchoring primetime. William D. Cohan examines how Wall Street is profiting from wartime financial shocks. And Julia Alexander reveals how South Park became the envy of streaming—and perhaps the most important asset in Shari Redstone‘s media empire.

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Inside Russia’s Media Black Hole

Within Putin’s propaganda machine, where injured Ukranian mothers are “crisis actors” and Zelensky is a neo-nazi stooge, polls show two-thirds support for Russia’s “special military operation.” But how much of the public’s consent is manufactured? And could a generational divide provide a sliver of hope?

Ever since the Russian army invaded Ukraine, I am constantly asked: what do the Russian people think about the war? Do they support it? This is a deceptively difficult question to answer. Even before the war, when Russia was an authoritarian country with a small, marginalized independent press, it was hard to separate what people actually believed from the sanctioned talking points they would parrot from state-owned television. How many Russians, after all, would give their true and unvarnished opinion to a stranger from an official-sounding organization, calling out of the blue? 

Of course, the job of the Russian pollster is that much harder now that Vladimir Putin has pushed the country into full totalitarian mode, shut down what was left of the independent media and criminalized any deviation from the official line on the war. Moreover, as I’ve noted before—and as a group of independent Russian sociologists recently documented—the majority of Russians do support the war, but only as they experience it in an informational blackout. It is not the same war that we in the West are seeing. Instead, they are told, it’s an easy, limited military operation to liberate the grateful Ukrainian people from Nazis, and with few casualties among the Russian military or the Ukrainian people. 

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I also wanted to understand what people outside my cohort—Russian journalists and creative types who fled en masse with the outbreak of the war—thought. They are all unanimously and loudly against the war, but I am well aware that they are not a representative sample…

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