You mean like Julian Assange? You are terribly naive if you don’t believe that the powers that be in the USA have substantial influence or even control over the prestige media.

That's some control. One example - last year one brave lady from TV staff protesting IIRC via banners against the war in state TV. I hope she is still alive and well (for that part probably outside of russia).

Of course the ultimate goal would be total control, so they counter similar situation (or putaine giving some speech live in tv) with ie 1 minute delay to counter any 'mishaps'. So they are going there, but slowly, ineffectively, at least for now.

Russian state can't unroll all freedoms immediately, their main goal was to paint war as "nothing is happening, just minor security cleanup". Putaine's clique is, just like any dictator, scared shitless of people revolting en masse, there is nothing more important for them than keeping the power and stealing all those juicy billions in resources and services flowing. But for majority of russians to revolt, they would have to go quite a bit beyond FUBAR, population is trained with patriotic spin to suffer incompetence of its leaders for generations.