In British reporter Chris Ayres’s memoir War Reporting for Cowards, he describes the arrival briefing he got from the woman he was replacing as New York correspondent of the London Times: “‘Lift and view, Chris, is what we do here … We lift from the New York Times.’ She held up the copy on her desk. ‘And we watch the news.’ She pointed to CNN. ‘We lift … and view. If you get the hang of that, you too can be a foreign correspondent’.”

As a description of how even prestigious media organizations work, it’s very revealing. Research indicates that the vast majority of English-language media stories are taken, almost word for word, from just two sources: a handful of press agencies (primarily AP), and government or corporate press releases. The existence of a large number of media outlets might lead us to believe that we are getting a wide variety of takes on world events. In reality, no matter what we read or watch, we mostly get the same few stories told in exactly the same way. This is especially true of foreign affairs, as the number of Westerners working as foreign correspondents is extremely small.

A glaring example of the practice of “lift and view” was the coverage this weekend of the murder of Daria Platonova (Dugina), the daughter of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. Leading English-language media outlets ran almost identical, and identically wrong, headlines, and repeated almost identical, and identically wrong, claims within the stories which followed. The coverage revealed not just the widespread tendency to cut and paste (or “lift and view” as Ayres puts it), but also a disturbing lack of knowledge.

The BBC led with “Darya Dugina: Daughter of Putin ally killed in Moscow blast.” Author Leo Sands told readers that, “It is thought that her father, the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is known as “Putin’s brain,” may have been the intended target of the attack. Mr Dugin is a prominent ultra-nationalist who is believed to be close to the Russian president.”