MOSCOW, March 14. /TASS/. The leak of UK Foreign Office materials about pressure on the mass media explodes the myth of the traditions of the independent press in the United Kingdom, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday.
"British files, <…> documents and materials attributed to the British Foreign Office have been leaked into the worldwide web. <…> Publication of these materials scuttles the myth that there is a freedom of speech in the Great Britain, that it has any traditions of the independent press, that there is a distance between the press and political establishment," she said in an interview with the Voskresny Vecher (Sunday Evening) with Vladimir Solovyov program on the Rossiya-1 television channel.
According to the Russian diplomat, Oprah Winfrey's recent interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, has made its contribution to discrediting the British mass media. "Another colossal thing linked with the unmasking of what Great Britain has been calling its traditions of the freedom of speech, occurred during the notorious interview, which has shocked the world. <…> The Duke and Duchess of Sussex said that the institute of monarchy in principle is in a tacit collusion with tabloids that each person has his or her role with tabloids. Well. They told quite enough to see that there is no unbiasedness, and what is most important, no independence and objectivity in British tabloids," she explained.
Zakharova told a briefing earlier that documents, presumably of the UK Foreign Office, that had been released in early February indicated that London was supporting, via mediators, the so-called independent mass media outlets and had forged a secretive network of influencer bloggers in the Russian-language segment of social networks to create conditions for the change of regime in Russia and undermine Russia’s influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.