Putin and his associates basically monopolised all TV and maybe even newspapers very early on in his rule. I think he completed it by 2002. I remember some TV channels, critical of him, struggling to survive this purge, but ultimately failing.
After that Ryazan home bombing incident in 1999 where NTV connected FSB and Putin personally to the explosions. Russian apartment bombings - Wikipedia The original conspiracy theory that actually holds some water compared to say 9/11 conspiracy theories. Putin got angry, his friends bought NTV and purged all the staff members, so that people who reported about the incident and blamed it on Putin and FSB will no longer be on air to do something like that again. They switched to TV6, but Putin shut that down as well. Then they switched to TVS, but Putin got them there as well. From there on no one on TV reports stuff that Putin does not like.
Since then all people in the media are like Dmitriy Kiselev and Vladimir Soloviyov who keep telling people all sorts of lies about anything really. For example, there are Nazi in Ukraine. Their narrative goes something like that:
Nazi in Ukraine abuse, murder and harass poor innocent people of Ukraine. Russia and Putin try to stop these abuses. However, the evil West are being mean about it, trying to choke Russia with sanctions and what not. Then they further say since the US, Europe and the West support Nazi in Ukraine then they are closet Nazi themselves. They all are bad guys therefore.
It is with lies like that they mobilise the population against the West and in support of Putin. Those whose English language ability and computer skills are poor have no other news but these, so they are completely brainwashed by Putin's propaganda machine.
They also forged evidence of 'crimes' that Ukrainian Nazi have committed and showed them on TV like these are real things.
That was in 2019. At one place where I once lived there was a TV in the laundry and it was tuned to SBS that broadcasts foreign news occasionally. One time they broadcast the Russian 1st Channel. And the main segment was dedicated to Ukraine. Russian news interviewed staffers of a Ukrainian newspaper in Kyiv who had their office blown up by a grenade launcher. They did not show much footage of actual damage (since there was none of course). However the newspaper staffer told Russian journalists that people who did that most likely wanted to shut the paper down because of their pro-Russian stance. They also complained that Ukrainian Police would not do anything about it because they are anti-Russian.
The whole news segment is of course a complete lie and completely made up by Russian TV 'journalists'. There was no explosion in Kyiv that day. A newspaper was probably also a fake, and the person they interviewed probably did not do anything else but played various roles for the Russian TV fake news.
However, if people do not know it is a lie, they will think that something like that is horrible, and someone has to do something about these crazy people that blew up newspaper offices with grenade launchers.
Because of the news segments like that back then, now Putin tells them that his invasion in Ukraine is just to stop people with grenade launchers from blowing up news paper's offices.
Believers of course think it is the right thing to do. Those who know the truth are appalled and disheartened by how much power Putin's lies have.
Many of these TV people in Russia have their offices in the Ostankino broadcasting tower. The tower is often called Ostankino Syringe. A very fitting sobriquet, considering the lies they spread over the country from there are as bad as something like Heroin. Putin's power really lies in that tower. Lenin once said that 'religion is opium for the masses'. I would say totalitarian propaganda is heroin for the masses.
More on the internet, since Putin can't control or censor the internet, he is concerned that it can eventually ferment an uprising against his rule, like it did in Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova before. In Belarus as well, though Lukashenka managed to suppress the protest there. I am not sure if Putin lent him some Russian riot police to do that. There were speculations like that.
Putin can't just ban the internet altogether like another concerned dictator, Kim Jong Un of North Korea. They have media like in Russia and ban not only the Internet, but also computers, mobile phones. They even run distortion generators to prevent people from tuning in to South Korean radio.
Because, with the internet North Korean people can find out that the rest of the world does not starve even more than they are, as their own media claim. They may also find out that the US did not kill all the men, rape al the women and drowned all children in South Korea, like North Korean media says they did. All of that might make them disillusioned and angry with a regime and ferment a revolution.
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