Is the media being a bit harsh on the Soyuz over todays "successful failure"?

They are

Remember it was a Soyuz that put Juri Gagarin and Liaka into space

Accidents do happen

And at least they had a contingency plan that worked' it could have been worse

Overall. Soyuz is the most successful launch vehicle humans have built yet. Arguably the Apollo capsules were better spacecraft than the Soviet equipment of the time (and the Saturn V rockets were awesome), but they killed three astronauts and nearly killed three more. Soyuz has also had more than ten times as many successful launches than Apollo.

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There are concerns about degrading quality control in the Russian space program, though. For example, there have been over 150 launches of the Progress cargo spacecraft, which are modeled upon Soyuz, with only three failures, but all three of those failures have happened since 2010, while the craft have been flown since the late 1970's.

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The media always want a good story so they like to play up the negative side, but of course you're right - this is a well tried and tested launch vehicle, occasionally it goes wrong like anything else does, but it has an escape system for if **** happens too close to the ground and that worked exactly as it's supposed to.

I know I've said this to you before - the rocket is basically an update of the one that launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, the capsule is an update of the first Soyuz launched in 1967, it's all worked completely safely hundreds of times, but as it's always a new rocket and capsule every time there's always the possibility it can go wrong. Just the same as any new car from an existing range could turn out to be a "lemon".

If American media are criticising this, they need to look at NASA's record, which isn't entirely clean either.

yes the media is clearly biased against the russians. the soyuz has proved itself time and again to be a highly robust, reliable, safe and economical system to launch humans into space. it makes us question why the united states has been wasting billions of dollars to develop it's own launch system, which will be bound to have failures and possibly cost astronauts their lives. paying the russians for rides to space is far more cost effective and would be far safer and reliable.

Well... the guys are safe, but the mission wasn't accomplished. Same to be said for Apollo 13. The potential for disaster is always there, but events like these make people more aware of the possibility.

No... potentially less dangerous because the escape system worked.

However there has recently been a hint of sabotage on the ISS. I hope there is no linkage.