There is a small irony buried in the Russian calendar that almost nobody notices. The country keeps a generous collection of press holidays. One marks the appearance, three centuries ago, of the first issue of a state gazette under Peter the Great. Another, inherited from Soviet times, commemorates the day in 1912 when the first issue of Pravda rolled off the press. And somewhere in between sits the imported World Press Freedom Day, observed with a kind of polite confusion, as if it were a foreign saint nobody in the house actually prays to. The accumulation is telling. A culture that has to multiply its festivals of the press is usually a culture compensating for something it never had.
Because here is the thing that the holidays are designed to obscure: the two newspapers that stand as the great symbols of the Russian press, Vedomosti and Pravda, were never created to inform anyone. They were created to instruct. One was the organ of the state, the other the organ of the party, and within a decade and a half the distinction collapsed entirely, because the party had become the state and the state had become the party. Neither was built to satisfy a citizen’s need to know what was happening in the world. Both were built to tell that citizen what to think about it. This is not a degeneration that set in later, under some bad tsar or some worse general secretary. It is the founding genetic code. The Russian press did not begin as a free institution and then lose its freedom. It was born unfree, an instrument, a megaphone — and an instrument cannot be liberated, because it never belonged to itself in the first place.
This matters now more than ever, because in 2025 Russia reached the lowest position it has ever held in the annual ranking of press freedom compiled by Reporters Without Borders: 171st out of 180 countries, a drop of nine places in a single year. Its neighbors at the bottom of that table are Turkmenistan, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Iran, North Korea, Eritrea. This is the company a country keeps when its media exist only to serve power. And it is worth stating plainly, because the Russian state and its apologists abroad love to pretend that “press freedom” is a Western fetish, a matter of degree, a luxury — when in fact what the ranking measures is whether anything resembling journalism is permitted to exist at all. In Russia, increasingly, it is not.
A blow to the head is not a profession
I want to be honest about my own discomfort with these rankings, because the honesty is part of the argument. The people who compile them are serious human rights defenders, and I respect them. But human rights work, practiced long enough, develops its own characteristic distortion — a kind of professional deformation. The defender of rights comes to believe that anyone who calls himself “media” is entitled, by that label alone, to be defended. I have watched this happen. I have seen human rights advocates rise to protect the outlets of the Kremlin’s most poisonous television personalities, the Simonyans and the Solovyovs, on the grounds that “they are journalists too, and one mustn’t mistreat journalists.” And I have always refused to play along, because the premise is false. They are not journalists. They are something else, and we lack the courage to name it.
What they do is not the transmission of information, however biased. It is the delivery of a blow to the public consciousness — a deliberate, engineered chemical strike on the way a population perceives reality. And a person who delivers that blow professionally, for a salary, day after day, is not a colleague of the reporter. He is closer to the operator of a harmful drug. I held this position years ago, in a previous professional life, when I argued against the International Federation of Journalists, which wanted to extend the protections of our guild to the propagandists on the grounds that they, too, carried press cards. I said then what I say now: propaganda should be combated the way we combat the trafficking of a dangerous substance, because that is functionally what it is. It addicts, it deranges, it destroys the capacity for judgment, and it does so on purpose. To file it under “free speech” is a category error so large that it has become a moral failure.
This is the root of what I called the deformation in the rankings. The same logic that defends Solovyov as a “journalist” also penalizes Lithuania and Latvia for banning Russian state channels — treating those bans as a fall from grace, a stain on an otherwise good record. But those bans are not censorship. They are national defense. When a hostile state is using broadcast media as a weapon of war against you, prohibiting that weapon on your territory is no more a violation of free speech than confiscating an enemy’s munitions is a violation of property rights. A democracy has every right — I would say every obligation — to refuse hostile foreign propaganda entry into its information space. The confusion of these two things, the suppression of free citizens speaking and the interdiction of an enemy’s psychological ordnance, is precisely the confusion that the propagandists most want us to make. It is the alibi inside which they operate.
The American mind under injection
If this were only a Russian disease, it would be a sad provincial story. It is not. The same ranking that put Russia near the bottom recorded the United States slipping to 57th place, dragged down by the collapse of regional journalism and by a head of state who treats the press as an adversary to be punished with economic pressure. And the most dangerous development is not the persecution of reporters; it is the importation of the Russian model into the American bloodstream by figures of genuine talent.
Consider the long, fawning interview given by a senior American envoy alongside the most gifted broadcaster in the MAGA constellation — an hour and a half in which the two of them lied, without pause, about the history of Ukraine, the causes of the war, and the situation at the front. They claimed the occupied regions had voted in genuine referendums to join Russia; they confused the very names of those regions; they recited, in good faith, the entire counterfeit history of Ukraine as a “fake country” stitched together by Khrushchev — a man who, they were sure, was Ukrainian, and who was in fact a Russian born in the Kursk region with no role whatever in the events they ascribed to him. None of this was journalism. It was the pure Putin version of the world, decanted directly into the American mind, and the reason it is more dangerous than a thousand crude Solovyov rants is precisely that the man delivering it is more talented, more professional, more persuasive than anyone on Russian state television.
I do not use the comparison lightly, but the historical role that has been reserved for such a figure is the role of a Goebbels, a Streicher — the gifted communicator who makes the lie beautiful, who makes the poison go down smooth. That is the function being performed, whatever the performer believes about himself. And it should sober anyone who imagines that the free press of an old democracy is somehow immune. The injection works on healthy bodies too. It works better on healthy bodies, because they have no antibodies.
When the label is earned, and when it is not
A caution is owed here, because the argument I am making can be abused. To say that a propagandist is not a journalist is not to grant anyone a license to brand every inconvenient voice a propagandist. The label has to be earned by an actual transformation, not assigned by premature suspicion. A person can begin as a legitimate interviewer — even a good one — and then degrade, over time, into something else: into the Solovyov who invites a guest onto his program not to hear him but to humiliate him, to ridicule him before a baying audience. That is a real degradation, and it is visible, and it can be named once it has actually occurred. What we are not entitled to do is to read the verdict in advance, to declare a person guilty of propaganda before he has done the work of becoming a propagandist. The distinction between a journalist and a drug-dealer of the consciousness is sharp and it is real — but it is a distinction we must draw on the evidence of conduct, not on the basis of which side a person happens to be on. Otherwise we become, in our own small way, exactly the thing we are fighting.
What a democracy owes itself, and what it owes the world
From all of this I draw a conclusion that some readers will find severe, and I mean it in full seriousness. A democratic state should have no internal propaganda whatsoever. It should not own media aimed at its own population. The proper relationship between a free government and its citizens is not one of instruction; the citizen is the source of legitimacy, not the object of conditioning. The moment a democracy builds a machine to shape the consciousness of its own people, it has begun to betray the principle that makes it a democracy. State media pointed inward is a contradiction in terms — it is the seed of the very disease whose mature form we see in Russia.
External information work is a different matter entirely, and here we have to be honest about a painful asymmetry. A state may legitimately maintain instruments that carry reliable information beyond its borders, into closed societies and contested ones — but only if it possesses an assertive foreign policy to give those instruments meaning. This is why Ukraine, for all its courage, is at a structural disadvantage: it lacks such tools almost entirely, and it pays for the lack every day, as Russian external propaganda — well funded, well organized, with real reach into Latin America and parts of Europe — floods the world with its version of events while Ukrainian truth crawls behind it like a tortoise. Lies fly on wings; the truth goes on foot. That gap is not a moral failing of Ukraine’s. It is a capability it was never given the time or the means to build.
And it is precisely against this background that the destruction of Voice of America and the gutting of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty must be measured for what they are: not a budget cut, but an act of disarmament in the information war, the deliberate silencing of reliable broadcasting that reached the ears of hundreds of millions of people living under regimes that lie to them by design. These were among the few instruments capable of putting honest information inside the closed rooms where propaganda otherwise rules without competition. To kill them is to leave those hundreds of millions alone with the drug, with no antidote on offer.
So we arrive back at the beginning, at the calendar full of holidays for a press that was never free. The lesson Russia teaches — and the lesson the West is now in danger of learning the hard way — is that the line between journalism and propaganda is not pedantic and not negotiable. One informs a free people so that they may govern themselves. The other deranges them so that they may be governed. Defending the first while banning the second is not censorship and never was. It is simply the elementary self-respect of a civilization that still intends to remain free.