MOSCOW, April 23. /TASS/. Commenting on the US allegations on freedom of press in Russia, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on Washington to take concrete steps to fix such issues in its own country.
"We noted increasingly frequent attempts of our American partners to present the situation with the freedom of press in Russia amid the complicated pandemic conditions in a negative light," the diplomat said. "We believe that such assessments have highly politicized nature, because they are based not on facts, but on [Washington’s] own interpretation of materials, comments and interviews. We call on our US partners to refrain from actions that could be easily qualified as meddling in Russia’s internal affairs."
Zakharova called on Washington to focus on its own issues in this field, which, according to the diplomat, there is still quite a few of.
"These issues are not limited by negative rhetoric of US officials towards the media alone," she noted. "According to numerous reports of international human rights organizations, cases of physical violence against media employees continue in the US, as well as such form of media harassment as lawsuits. The human rights organizations are also concerned by particularly strict searches of journalists at the US border and forced disclosure of official information sources."
Zakharova pointed towards discrimination that various foreign media, including the Russian ones, face in the US.
"An atmosphere of hostility and mistrust is being actively formed around RT and Sputnik," she said. "In the meantime, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) prevents the Chinese media from properly conducting its journalist work."
At the same time, media sweeps continue to avoid the notorious Ukrainian Mirotvorets website, which publishes journalists’ personal data online.
"It keeps running on the US servers, despite posing a direct threat to all journalists included in its database," Zakharova noted. "We expect the US to exercise not superficial concerns about the freedom of press across the globe, but concrete steps on fixing the situation with the media rights in their own country, first and foremost.".