My, the Russian and about-Russia blogosphere is so filled with moderated comment sections!

This column here on the Foreign Policy Blogs Network by Vadim Nikitin has one of those moral-equivalency spasms on the way to trying to say something about coverage of the Moscow metro blast, hence the title, "Russia Today: The Kremlin's Fox News" which is actually a clever pelmeni package with the bit o' meat inside telling us that Russia Today is a good thing.

The story of the craven Kremlinated Russia Today is not about it being "like" or "equivalent" to Fox News, which could run circles around it in terms of independence, whatever its bias or offensiveness to the "world intelligentsia". P.S. It's not about it being "like" BBC, which could run circles around Fox and RT, of course. Pro-tip to RT: stop pretending what you are not and claiming you're like a free Western liberal democratic state news outlet, and just be what you are, a slick Kremlin operation — you will actually have more credibility.

So  for Nikitin to take that low road en route to attacking my comment about #socialmediafail is inherently lame — but I'm used to the "Russian-American dialogue" constantly taking place in a wind-tunnel of moral equivalencies and false parallels and defensive, nasty invective particularly from Russians that amount to the old Soviet retort in every debate, "Your Indians!" (We had no idea back then what the Soviets were doing to their indigenous and "small peoples" or we might have come better armed to these "peace" meetings.)

My answer to Vadim below.

Meanwhile, here's a completely different take on the media coverage issue that finds that the Russian Internet played a very important role in covering metro29. It's a very different piece than mine, with more links, by a colleague and someone I highly respect, Paul Goble, who simply has read tons more Russian provincial media than I manage to fit in a day, having to read in other subject areas as well. He thinks the Russian Internet moved the ball down the court on this one. I don't deny that; I celebrate it.

HOWEVER, I do distinguish between Russian online professional journalism, and online news agencies with semi-independence or even total independence, which did do a good job much later, and the blogosphere and Twitosphere, obviously, which did what I said it did, failing the first day when it was supposed to count (and the beauty part of Twitter is that if you disagree, you can just go read the stream,and read the LJ entries, and come to your own conclusion and not have to argue with me personally).

As I speculated: maybe we just need to understand Russian professional online newsmedia as "the blogs of Russia" that have to move a little slower, and then the blogs the Facebook pages, and we'll get it better.

In fact, LJ/Youtube/Twitter and even Facebook/vkontake were all responding in those early hours when the online newspapers didn't have their stories up yet. That came in the next 24 hour news cycle, and that was crucial — and will go on being more crucial likely than even the best of the blogosphere although we can hope some bloggers will keep going with this.

However, anyone who significantly challenges in a highly visible way the Kremlin's narrative about Chechen bombers is not going to live long. So I can't expect anyone to do this in some terribly in-depth way.

Reply to Vadim Nikitin:

You have got to be kidding! Russia Today is obviously not only a pro-Kremlin TV station; it is a Kremlin propagandistic project. Understood; countries have such things. But let's not prettify it or mislead the public about it.

Er, could you explain what about RT's coverage departed from the official line?

1. Female suicide bombers — check.
2. No witnesses saying anything of substance but "I saw a lot of smoke and heard a noise" — check.
3. Our boys in blue did a great job — check.
4. Russians are stoic and didn't panic — check.
5. This is all part of international terrorism (see Lavelle's talk show) — check.
6. Terrorism comes from poverty and is caused by joblessness (a kind of simplistic Marxist economic rationale) — check.

I'm not seeing how RT provided an alternative to the official position that has been the position of the Kremlin for years.

I'm not seeing how any probes of all the kinds of questions there are to be asked are appearing (give me somes links).

1. Why aren't there bomb dogs in the metro after six terrorist attacks?
2. Why weren't the trains all immediately stopped? Why were the escalators shut down to prevent quick evacuation?
3. There's no eyewitnesses? Not one? Not a victim or doctor to be interviewed? No inside police contacts to be talked to?
4. RT has journalists itself who are eyewitnesses — yet they can't report from the scene? They have to come hours later to the studio?
5. How did these people get on even private buses with bomb material and get it into the city?

Provocative take? Where? Any discussion about human rights activists murdered in the Caucasus like Natalya Estemirova? Any discussion about Kadyrov's reign of terror? (Lavelle even had the temerity to say "Say what you will about Kadyrov, but it's quiet down there lately".

And this isn't a discussion about Fox News. It's a discussion about RT. Sorry I won't play the moral equivalence game on this.

And having the talking heads like liberals Fred Weir or the Carnegie Endowment scholars just doesn't count. Let them chatter. The frame is all very clear — the Kremlin version of the story up and down, with only a sprinkling of seemingly independent sugar to make the medicine go down better.

What I *am* trying to understand is why you have such a felt need to misportray this situation so.