Amid blanket condemnation, some media outlets have been prudent to bring in some balance into their coverage of the Pussy Riot’s trial.

Following the announcement of the two-year jail sentence for three members of the feminist punk band on August 17, 2012, foreign media, political establishment and musicians have fumed over what they and some in Russia saw was ‘disproportionate’ punishment.

But while the majority of the mainstream media continue to describe Russia as something close to a “medieval dictatorship”, some wisely chose to shift the focus. No, they have not quite sided with the judge, but instead turned their fire against their own governments accusing them of a disproportionate response.

Simon Jenkins, from The Guardian, delivered a razor-sharp critique of the double standards the West was using – slamming others for the same kind of things they insist on in their own countries, like the case of Charlie Gilmour (son of Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour) who was sentenced to 16 months in prison for allegedly throwing a bin at a royal car and climbing on the Cenotaph.

“If a rock group invaded Westminster Abbey and gravely insulted a religious or ethnic minority before the high altar, we all know that ministers would howl for “exemplary punishment” and judges would oblige”, he says.

Mr Jenkins accuses the West of hypocrisy, with a rhetorical question: “So who are we to condemn Russia?”

Glenn Greenwald, his fellow author at The Guardian, dubs the widespread one-side coverage as “jingoism blind to US abuses” and gives an extensive list of sins that would make anyone else ashamed of lecturing others.

An op-ed by Vadim Nikitin in The New York Times focuses more on the rhetoric games played by the West which he thinks has always used dissidents to pursue their own goals.

“Pussy Riot’s philosophy, activism and even music quickly took second place to its usefulness in discrediting one of America’s geopolitical foes. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, are dissident intellectuals once again in danger of becoming pawns in the West’s anti-Russian narrative?”

He points out that the extreme ideas that brought the girls together would be “equally terrifying, provocative and threatening to the established order in both Russia and the West”, and that such “knee-jerk yet selective support for Russian dissidents — without fully engaging with their ideas — is not only hypocritical but also does a great disservice to their cause.”

Like the previously cited journalists, Rory Fitzgerald, from The Irish Times, believes that a change in gender and the politics of the protesters will prompt a completely different result in terms of international reaction.

He adds his personal opinion saying that Pussy Riot “shouldn’t have been jailed for their antics”.

Mr Fitzgerald also thinks it’s wrong for the western corporate media to focus on “celebrities and pretty faces”, because it gives the readers “a distorted picture” of what is really happening inside Russia by ignoring the “vastly more important protest movements” in recent years when the tens of thousands of ordinary unglamorous Russians voiced their dissent – “without invading churches or insulting people’s religion”.