The New Pravda

I've been poking around pravda.ru, a Russian newsite, reading articles with pro-Putin, anti-U.S. slants. Pravda was originally the official newspaper of the Soviet Union and an outlet for much of their propaganda. After the fall of the USSR, some of the paper's journalists founded a new paper of the same name. The new Pravda was bought soon after by Greek entrepreneurs, just in time for a major editorial schism to erupt. Many of the journalists from the Soviet era left and went on to establish Pravda Online, the nationalist, pro-Putin, anti-U.S., publication that exists today. Interestingly, the articles are not inaccurate. The straight information and the statistics are essentially true. But the narrative, the sensationalist headlines, and the missing information form a very different perspective of world events. A few of the articles I found particularly interesting:

Ban Ki-Moon: An insult to the memory of Dag Hammarskjöld

On the 50th anniversary of the death of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, Pravda had this to say of the current U.N. Secretary Ban-Ki Moon:

"As for Ban Ki-Moon, the history book will have him down as the weakest, most insignificant and inept non-entity ever to have insulted the UNO (the United Nations) and the world community of nations due to his biased and totally ineffective stance on Libya, where the UNO passed the responsibility to that evil clique of war-mongerers and murderers, NATO and stood back while these war criminals unleashed hordes of marauding thugs on the good people of the Jamahiriya."

The West does everything possible to make Russia dance to its tune

Pravda reports on the feud over natural gas prices between Turkey and Russia:
"It is not hard to understand the concerns of Turkish and Western business partners. Cheap fuel has always been one of the basic conditions for the prosperity of Western economies. The current situation is different, though. However, the West has always glorified the market freedom and everything else that is related to it. Why does Russia have to refuse from its own profit if gas prices have grown? Would Germany sell Mercedes cars at half-price?"

NATO exterminates 2 percent of a populated city
This is an opinion piece on the war in Libya:

"In truth, the only ones NATO is "protecting" are their terrorist criminal stooges so that they may create havoc and total disaster on an unfriendly population that hates them and all they stand for: terror, murder, destruction, crime, rape, theft, treason and inviting colonial crusader powers to take over the country so that they may obtain personal financial gain."

Putin solves all problems Russia had with China
Despite the headline, the article is not as emotionally charged as some of the others. It still comes off as pretty one-sided by chalking up "all the problems" to China's unwillingness to pay the full price for Russian oil:
"During his visit to China, Vladimir Putin managed to come to an agreement regarding the payments for the Russian oil. Officials with the Russian administration believe that China was not paying the full price for the Russian oil. According to them, China was keeping $3 from every barrel. Chinese officials claim that those were "transportation costs."

Putin: "We don't need great disaster. We need great Russia"

This one has relatively neutral language, but you can still hear the reporter's excitement over the presidential candidacy of Vladimir Putin:

"The Russians say that they trust Putin and that they do not see any other candidate. Many people said that they were used to having Putin as the leader. People notice positive changes that have happened in the country during the recent years. Many of them say that the changes became possible because of Putin's work. The respondents said that they think of Putin as a responsible, experienced and confident politician."