Isaac Chotiner has an issue with the volume of Pussy Riot coverage:

I don’t want to undercut the reporters who have chronicled Russia’s long, miserable record on free speech. Locking up a band for criticizing the president, or the church, is terrible. But I can’t help but think there’s something a little off-kilter in the sheer amount of attention Pussy Riot is getting. The coverage is morphing into the human-rights equivalent of the blanket coverage afforded to the lone white girl who goes missing on a tropical vacation.

Of course, you can’t measure every story by whether it is more or less outrageous than the slaughter of 22 bus passengers who happened to come from the wrong religious sect. But the media frenzy does make me think that for many people in the news business, the story of the band is appealing in large part because of its name and the camera-friendliness of its members–not to mention the celebrity of Pussy Riot defenders like Madonna, Sting, and Paul McCartney.

No doubt the latter point is a big part of the volume of coverage, but I think this complaint is misguided. The reason why all this coverage is happening is because the story is pretty easy to explain, it has deep and obvious political implications, and is incredibly, almost comically, unjust. It shows so much about the Putin regime, both the brutality and the insecurity behind it, the shambles of a justice system and the lack of liberal institutions in Russia generally. And those three young women are at the center of the story doesn’t hurt in drawing attention.

I do believe that America ought to maintain good relations with Russia, as well as with every other government that we can. But at the same time, it’s not exactly a great place to live, as Masha Gessen and others have compellingly argued. Putin’s regime isn’t the worst in the world, but it is a living hell for a lot of people, and this story draws awareness to some significant details of the picture. I would argue it’s the watershed moment that has eluded Putin’s critics for years, the moment where the rest of the world realizes exactly who this man is. Plus, the notion that there are so many other stories about human rights activists and dissidents being squashed by attention to Pussy Riot is laughable, it’s probably just replacing another story about Paul Ryan’s washboard abs. The media simply has no interest in this stuff unless there’s a damn strong hook to it, and fortunately this time there are several. It’s telling that the only other successful attempt at popular awareness of human rights violations in recent memory is the Kony 2012 campaign, a viral video that media sources had to catch up with. Only the Kony 2012 people sweetened the story to be more easily absorbed, which is not really the case here. This is, much as nobody wants to hear it, an example of the media doing something right.