From the word “go,” Russian state media have been largely sympathetic toward Donald Trump. Even prior to the Republican primaries, they reported every minor bump and hiccup in his ratings.

In September, Trump’s against-the-odds campaign garnered more attention than Russia’s own parliamentary elections. A week before Russians went to the polls to vote for the new Duma, Vesti Nedeli ("News of the Week"), a weekly news review show on state TV channel Rossiya, spent 8 minutes covering the upcoming Russian elections and another 9 discussing whether Donald Trump might be assassinated. Most national outlets devoted extensive coverage to even the most minuscule revelations from the leaked Democratic National Commission and Clinton staff emails.

But it is an oversimplification to say state media went all out for Trump. They were less for Trump, more staunchly against Clinton. And here they followed President Vladimir Putin’s own lead: in 2011, he accused the then-secretary of state of fomenting protests in Russia. Unsurprisingly, his media have not wasted an opportunity to portray Clinton as a Russophobic warmonger.

RIA Novosti, once Russia’s largest and most respected news agency, has been the vanguard of the agitprop efforts. To its credit, the agency’s DC bureau has provided mostly objective and balanced coverage of the election. But the most popular of RIA’s election dispatches, which garnered almost 200,000 page views, went so far as to claim “Clinton has problems with her head.”



