Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that Western journalists “live in a state of military censorship” and “receive instructions from their special services.”
“There are a lot of serious media outlets (in the West), a lot of talented journalists, smart, professional, but now, since they unleashed this war against us, they absolutely live in a state of military censorship,” Peskov said at a youth forum in Solnechnogorsk, 45 kilometers northwest of Moscow.
Western media “receive instructions and manuals from their special services, they get leaks of information – which are mostly, very often, specially and professionally prepared falsehoods – and do this round the clock”, Peskov said.
The world’s most influential media are “unfortunately the Anglo-Saxon media, American and British,” Peskov said. In May, Peskov said that the West “became hysterical” and discarded freedom of speech due to the Ukraine War.
Russian media like Sputnik News and Russia Today have been dropped by many US carriers like DirecTV, and outright banned in the EU and Canada, in apparent violation of constitutional guarantees of freedom of the press.
The reason given was alleged “Russian disinformation”, although the Twitter Leaks revealed than many charges of “Russian disinformation” were actually contrived by a handful of US government and NATO related think tanks and NGOs like the German Marshall Fund’s Hamilton 68 dashboard, the US government’s Global Engagement Center and National Endowment for Democracy, Anne Applebaum’s Arena Institute, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Carnegie Endowment, among others.
UK broadcast media regulator Ofcom banned Russia Today in May 2022, which Peskov called “another step to grossly restrict freedom of speech, to violate all laws related to the work of the media,” and “a continuation of the anti-Russian madness that is happening in Europe and the US.”
By Richard Abelson