Of 3.9 million Russian news articles studied, 77 percent were from either a government-owned or government-influenced outlet.
In a study which collected 3.9 million online news articles published between April 1 2013 through March 31 2015 from the top 48 internet-based news outlets in Russia, researchers Andrey Simonov and Justin Rao discovered that a majority came from government-owned and government-influenced sources.
An article was considered influenced if the outlet publishing the piece was owned by an oligarch or someone close to Putin, for example.
