I've noticed something which I think is positive in the Swedish media recently (since the Ukraine crisis). This is that Swedish media sometimes quotes RT, without the affadavit about it being "Russian state media", "propaganda" etc.

I don't know if this trend happened elsewhere in continental Europe as well, but the quality of journalism in many smaller countries has diminished in a very obvious ways. In some cases it's not much more than a translation of a story in the English speaking press.

In the past, the main news outlets had their own reporters in cities like Moscow, the main European capitals and elsewhere in the world. If at all possible, they sent somebody who spoke the local language. For example the journalist covering Russia, would be Russian speaking and have a high degree of insight into local conditions.

But now - the journalists can all speak reasonably good English, and the internet is available. No need for serious journalism anymore - just copy and translation from the English speaking press! A lot of the times these journalists don't have enough insight to know the difference in flavour between the BBC, Daily Telegraph, Fox News and Alex Jones -- with some borderline ludicrous results.
That's been the pathetic trend for the last 8-10 years.

So for the Russia-coverage, they would just grab it from Reuters, Daily Mail, Washington Post or similar types of sources. Usually you can spot it with Russian stories because the journalists doing the translating that now passes for journalism are so ignorant that they will keep the English transliteration of Russian names of people and places, rather than using the normal Nordic traditional transliteration of Cyrillic. I.e, "Yuri" instead of "Jurij".

It's really pathetic and it certainly gives the game away. I'm not the only person to have noticed this. Somebody else's propaganda becomes our news. You often see ironic comments to news stories like "good translation from Washington Post".

However, now that they "discovered" RT, they are actually beginning to report in a more balanced way. I assume they realise that RT is Russian. It's still pathetic that they only bother reading in English, and don't actually try to conduct their own interviews and research.

But at least RT is preferable to using US and British media exclusively. Hopefully the journalists are reading some of the comments and noticing that the tides are turning for quite a few people across the world. Many people are aware that RT is more truthful than most of the English speaking press with a lot of issues.

I can only guess that the same thing is probably happening in many other European countries as well as Sweden. Places like Scandinavia, Benelux etc.

The money Russia spends on RT is money very well spent.