Media is one of the most powerful tool in a war. You control the media you control the sentiment of the people. Almost all popular media is controlled and own by America and its allies.
Just because 50% of Russian media is government owned and the other 50% is government controlled, including with censorship, intimidation, and assassination of journalists, doesn't mean that's how the media operates in the rest of the world. Most of western media is owned by private companies, and often publishes things that are very against the government of the countries they are in. In this particular case, we have Russian government media, versus independent journalists. The biggest problem is that Russia doesn't care about "journalistic integrity" and publishes whatever story they want, as fast as they want, sometimes even before the story comes out. Non-russian media tends to value truth above everything, because if they are found to be lying, they can get discredited and lose a lot of business. So they tend to not report, or be vague about what is being reported. For example, EVERYONE knew that the troops without any insignia that showed up in Crimea were Russian. It was blatantly obvious. But no one dared publish that without absolute proof, for fear of being found wrong. Likewise, here the media is quick to claim that it is Poroshenko's Ukrainian army that bombed that area and killed that family, but they provide no proof. The American or Western media is not reporting this because they don't know who is responsible, Ukrainian bombers, separatist mortars, or just thugs with guns going through the area. And that's one major weakness of the "Western Media" compared to Soviet and now Russian media - Russia can keep making things up and lie so fast that the western media has no chance to keep up.
