MOSCOW, April 20, 4:49 /ITAR-TASS/. Western media is trying to show Russia in an unflattering light when covering the Ukraine crisis and its stance is conscientiously Russophobic.
“They have a task to show Russia in an unflattering light, and this task is editorial,” Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with the “Right to Know” television programme on TVTs channel on April 19.
“There are chronic inflammatory processes of consciousness that are deeply rooted in the “Cold War” era. These processes have not gone anywhere. They were simply overlapped by new perceptions like the atmosphere of a ‘reset’ and globalisation when people started travelling and meeting each other and when a thing like public diplomacy emerged,” Peskov said, adding that phobias and Russophobia have always been present in media coverage of events related to Russia.
“Russophobia warmed up sometimes artfully and elegantly and sometimes by openly rude and unpardonable barrage of propaganda that would make the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) envious tends to aggravate in critical moments. This is what we now see in the United States and Europe,” Peskov complained.
He said facts were being slanted and distorted even when foreign journalists sent balanced and objective reports from Russia. But their reports lose their balanced approach after their editorial offices edit them.
Peskov gave an example of a television story when Ukrainian radicals burst into the office of Ukraine’s First Channel, beat up its editor-in-chief and forced him to write a letter of resignation. “My good friend in New York woke me up in the middle of the night and said ’Have you got out of you mind? A respected TV channel here shows how Russian deputies came to Kiev and beat up the head of Ukraine’s First Channel. This is an American channel, and the Americans believe it,” Peskov said, saying he did not even know what to say to his friend.
“The only thing I said was ‘I swear that they are not Russian deputies!” Peskov went on to say. “As a result, we see American audiences deprived of free information,” he said.
Peskov expressed the hope that when all the dust settled down and Russia and the Wet returned to a mutually beneficial rather than cynical dialogue, then the role and responsibility of the media should be made a subject of international discussion on “how far the media can go in giving one-sided information when the future of countries like Ukraine is in question.