Network TV largely ignores Russia's two school attacks this week, as the Kremlin's spokesman blames the Internet

Russia has suffered two school attacks in a single week. In both Perm and Ulan-Ude, upperclassmen armed with blades assaulted teachers and fellow students. It’s not yet clear what motivated these crimes, but preliminary reports indicate that the young men in both incidents were out for petty revenge (for expulsion, for a bad grade).

What do Russians make of this bloody week? Many of them probably aren’t even aware of it. Meduzaexamined the coverage on national television and found that the major networks barely reported the stories, and not a single station bothered to mention that the attack in Buryatia was Russia’s second explosion of school violence in a single week.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, weighed in on the attack in Ulan-Ude, apparently blaming the World Wide Web: “The Internet has a lot of good, but you can’t ignore the fact that the Internet also has evil that sometimes manifests itself in our lives in such an ugly and tragic way. So there are questions we’ve got to ask here.”