I can't gauge the tone of Russian language news reports, but can I just ask, what's the deal with en.rsport.ru? Quite a few of their English language articles about Plushy seemed to me to be in tones that were kind of snide and antagonistic. Maybe it's just me being over-sensitive again, but seriously, if I haven't seen the "ru" domain name, I certainly would have mistaken it to be one of the nastier NA media: the things they say were (mostly) factual, but they use all these little tricks standard to NA journalism, for instance a subtle word choice here, an omission there...
For instance, right after the SP in Zagreb, they were the ones who came up with the story that he was "in tears" in the K&C (which I'm fairly sure was in fact factually false) "after an erratic performance", without at first saying a single word about his injuries, which I would have thought is the most relevant piece of information at that point (though it was mentioned in an addition to the article later). Recently, they reported Plushy's tweets about the results of the Worlds, which merely expressed similar opinions as many others, and made a big deal out of it, saying that he "attacked" Chan's win. (In comparison, for instance Lynn Rutherford used the more neutral "criticized" in her more recent article.) And now their article about this latest nonsense irritated me again. This one seems to be on the surface all factual, but the way the chose to spin it, for instance
...Evgeny Plushenko is denying reports spread by his wife that he has lost sponsors...
No, the reports were not spread by "his wife", but by the journalist who wrote the original report, and who either made up or misinterpreted whatever Yana might or might not have said. Perhaps I can imagine a scenario where Yana might have said something like "
if Zhurankov's words were widely believed by people, it can cause Plushenko to lose sponsors"... And later in the article, they stated, presenting it as an actual fact, that Yana said he lost sponsors. What are they trying to do, suggest there's a conflict between Plushy and Yana?
And the title of their report itself:
Plushenko Denies Reports Sponsors Have Left Amid Scandal
What scandal, may I ask? What they are trying to do is to actually create the impression that Plushy is somehow entangled in some "scandal", I think. And the words they use, "deny", "insist": they may seem synonymous to mere "say", but I think somehow in the way they get used in English these days, they still suggest--by connotation--that maybe there's something to all these accusations, and that he's just trying to cover it up...
(Sorry, I got picky about the press again. But now I seem to remember, isn't Ms. E. V. also at rsport.ru? (although writing in Russian) Or perhaps I remembered wrong?)
Edit: BTW, I just gritted my teeth and checked this en.rsport.ru article again, to make certain. Indeed, they omitted the fact that the original sovsport.ru article has been deleted/retracted.
Edit again: come to think of it,the whole business essentially is that some other journalist miswrote or invented some words by Yana, and Plushy wrote to clarify/correct this (see? two other words they could have used instead of "deny"!) Why is it worthy of a news article at all, anyway? If you ask me, frankly I think by writing "Plushenko denied XYZ happened", they are really trying to create the impression in the readers minds that "XYZ happened", that's their real point...