Do you believe in TV news stories? Personally, I tend not to believe in the objectivity of TV news. I'm not sure about other countries, but I should note that in Russia the primary goal of TV is to distract and to form a particular point of view in people's mind instead of presenting objective state of the art. I'm pretty sure that most of Russian italki members agree with me.

By the way, I should say the same about international news channels (e.g. BBC or CNN), but the naivety of those sometimes even more obvious. For example, I was always curious how these reporters always managed to find and interview decent english speaker among casual witnesses of an event or accident in all around the world. I would rather believe in simultaneous interpretation of the native speech.

USA citizens were trying to survive in Ekaterinburg without any knowledge of russian language Borrowed and translated from local news site. USA citizens teaching english in one of the language-emphasised school in Ekaterinburg and having poor knowledge of russian, walked around the Ekaterinburg as tourists and tried to find out how to reach a hotel, an airport, a railway station or a hospital, using only their native language. The short list of results is listed below: - Policemen friendly met foreigners, but communicated only in russian, showing the path on the map with their finger. - Then tourists tried to buy a ticket in the ticket-office of a museum and a theatre. Clerks were unable to answer questions, but the responsible person was called and explained everything in english. - A conductor of a tramway can't understand what strangers wanted and let them go for free. - Unfortunately, the city map in english can't be found. - In a pharmacy tourists were forced to communicate with gestures, the seller didn't understand english, but the language of gestures can be understood well. - The trial of buying flowers for a girl-friend ended up with a failure, because the seller didn't understand what the guests of the city wanted. - When they decided to take a break and to buy a hot-dog in a cafe, it took several minutes to explain what they want. The seller literally used gestures to explain how much they had to pay. "Tourists" have noted that in general people behave friendly and try to help. Therefore the knowledge of english leave a lot to be desired. Source (rus): http://www.e1.ru/news/spool/news_id-323940.html Fell free to fix errors and leave your comments.