Stubbornly, the U.S.-Russia summit will not provide any meaningful details before my late deadline this week so I began looking for other topics of interest. In my search I stumbled across the British media analysis site, the Press Gazette and its monthly ranking of the world's most visited English-language news websites.
BBC is number one by a wide margin: 949 million visits in June. The next most popular site, The New York Times, had 662 million visits in June. For a country of its size the U.K. garners a lot of global traffic; together with The Guardian and The Daily Mail, British news sites pulled in 1.5 billion visits in June.
American news sites comprise 12 of the top 20 most popular sites in June. The remaining five are Indian, the most popular being The India Times at number five with 357 million visits. And I was pleased to see the site that really started it all more than a quarter century ago, The Drudge Report, hanging in there at 56 million visits in June, and showing 13% growth over the last 12 months.
I sampled some of the sites to see their lead stories for Aug. 15, and how they covered them. BBC has live coverage of the Alaska summit, with heavy focus on Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy's absence. Indiatimes.com is very news-lite with main-page-focus on entertainment, with features on an American bodybuilder and American actress Jennifer Lawrence; its summit coverage is from Aug. 14 and reports on Russia deploying a third nuclear submarine in a show of force.
The Guardian's U.K. homepage leads with the summit and highlights "Trump's warm welcome" of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy's account of Russian strikes on civilian targets the day of the summit. The Hindustan Times leads with the summit, and notes that the U.S. "rolls out the red carpet" for Putin, also citing Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev's comments about the pre-summit mood as "combative."
And Matt Drudge's Drudge Report has the summit as its top headline, with links to articles about Putin's past as a KGB officer (an MSN repost of a Washington Post piece), a Sky News article about Ukraine's drone commander doubling down on drone attacks on Russia as the summit begins: a Fox News piece on the NATO defense minister expressing "absolute distrust" in Putin's willingness to consider a ceasefire; an Associated Press story summarizing the launch of the summit; and a Yahoo! repost of a Reuters story reporting that President Trump contacted the Norwegian finance minister to inquire about a Nobel Prize (Nobel Prizes are awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee). The Drudge Report does not disappoint.
Every one of these sites is watching what happens. And there are common threads in the international reportage. One is that Putin, a dictator who invaded a sovereign European nation, is receiving better treatment than Zelenskyy, a democratically elected president whose country has been invaded. Combined with Zelenskyy's absence, this will support the Kremlin narrative that Ukraine is not a sovereign nation and does not have the right to exist, and that Zelenskyy is not a credible national leader. That's a win for Putin before the meeting even starts.
Trump has made it clear that he will be disappointed if there is not a ceasefire agreed upon at the meeting, but he has also made it clear that this is just an introductory discussion. Another win for Putin. He doesn't have to do a thing, and their meeting is not public. Zelenskyy was thrown out of the Oval Office after being berated by the President and Vice President on live television.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made the trip to Alaska in full trolling mode, stepping off the plane wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the letters "CCCP," the Cyrillic spelling of "USSR," standing for "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," as reported by The Guardian. The article points out that Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine have had monuments to the Soviet-instigated famine of the 1930s, which killed millions of Ukrainians, dismantled at the direction of Russian authorities. Russian media on the official plane headed to Alaska were also served chicken kyiv as their in-flight meal (a famous Russian dish, Kyiv is also the capital of Ukraine).
It's a fair bet millions of people around the world will read that and make their own judgments about how respected we are by the Russians. Maybe not all 300 million of The Guardian's monthly viewers will read this, but it's hitting my X feed from a retired Supreme Allied Commander, Europe and a former Lithuanian Foreign Minister. So Lavrov is having his desired effect.
I can't read Hindi, Mandarin, or Russian, so I am missing a great deal of news context, I am sure. I am also reading news outlets that still operate under basic journalistic principles. Chinese and Russian media outlets are heavily state controlled. While I don't know as of this writing what the outcome of the summit will be, this glimpse into the world's lens shows me that concessions to achieve nothing have already been made, and the Russians are already declaring victory.
Merritt Hamilton Allen is a PR executive and former Navy officer. She appeared regularly as a panelist on NM PBS and is a frequent guest on News Radio KKOB. A Republican for 36 years, she became an independent upon reading the 2024 Republican platform. She lives amicably with her Democratic husband north of I-40 where they run one head of dog, and one of cat. She can be reached at
