They were lionizing the separatists and reporting breathlessly on their heroic deeds, which included reporting on them acquiring surface-to-air missiles and taking down Ukrainian planes. M ICHAEL IDOV: Well, the most fascinating part of this coverage is that it involves so much scrubbing of the reporting that all these news outlets have done before the crash, because you have to realize, for months now the official Russian media have been acting essentially as a recruitment tool.

And so, what you saw after the plane went down was just this frantic scrambling for conspiracy theories, anything that would lay the blame on anyone, other than Russia and Russia’s surrogates in the eastern Ukraine.īROOKE GLADSTONE: From the moment the plane was hit, there were some striking inconsistencies in the Russian media. And all these news outlets, willing, ready and able to amplify the official line were really left without an official line to push. And that voice is largely the voice of the Kremlin.īut what happened with Flight MH17 is for the first 48 hours or so, there were clearly no signals coming from the Kremlin.

One after another, respected news sources were sort of hollowed out and replaced by propaganda machines, but speak with a unified voice. M ICHAEL IDOV: The last year has seen an extermination of free speech and free press in Russia. He says Russian media outlets are just doing -what they've been doing. MALE CORRESPONDENT: A source in the Russian aviation industry, claiming President Putin’s plane may have actually been the target of the attack.įEMALE CORRESOPNDENT: The pro-Russian rebel commander making this bizarre suggestion, that MH17 was loaded with people who were already dead.īROOKE GLADSTONE: Novelist and screenwriter, Michael Idov, lives in Moscow. Secondly, it passed directly over a war zone. MALE CORRESPONDENT: To sum up, the plane diverged from its usual flight path. But the Russian media is waging a counter campaign, offering alternative theories for the crash. Although an official investigation into the crash has yet to begin, in the court of international opinion Russian separatists who had previously downed Ukrainian military planes in the region were clearly the culprits. On July 17 th, the airliner was shot down as it flew over the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. That's the first official evidence that the plane was downed by a missile. On Thursday, monitors at the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 detected shrapnel-like holes on parts of the wreckage. BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

Made in Russia by Michael Idov