It's forbidden to mention anything positive about USSR/Russia in Western media. It comes to the point that the first man in space now is Alan Shepard, not Yuri Gagarin (according to the US media).
It's commonly mentioned in the US that the USSR had the first satellite and first man in space.
I have literally never heard anyone claim that Alan Shepard was th "first man in space."
The only top search results for Alan Shepard which claim he was first in space are fanfic alternative history, which I guess is popular. I feel it’s quite popular to hypothesize that a Russian secretly preceded Gagarin but didn’t survive.