Well, not really, but check out this entirely speculative CBC "analysis" of how Russia has handled the pandemic.
One of the challenges facing the usual Putin-bashers now that coronavirus has sucked all the oxygen out of the news space is there's little room left for Putin-bashing.
Solution? Bash him with made-up coronavirus stories! The charges levelled against Russia's government, or the Putin regime, if you prefer, could be made against virtually any government today. Some of it may even be true, although writer Chris Brown's sources seem to go out of their way to stress they're working with hunches rather than facts.
Where Brown drops the ball is in failing to report the links between the Doctors Alliance of Russia, and Russia's most high-profile opposition activist, Alexei Navalny. He notes the Doctors Alliance rents office space from Navalny's organization, but then tells us that the Doctor's Alliance itself is apolitical.
This is not the case. There are ample stories out there detailing the links between Navalny and Doctors Alliance. Here's one from The Economist, in May of 2019, Russian Trade Unions get Political, that pretty much debunks what we just read at CBC.
Is this just lazy journalism, or is it something else?
Navalny's "movement" has impeccable connections to mainstream Western media via the offices of the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. All Navalny, or more likely, a personal assistant has to do is make a call, and miraculously, the same anti-Putin story shows up uniformly across the Western media firmament.
That's how the "free press" works!
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