Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has praised Fox News but condemned other US news outlets as propaganda because of their coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent Western media,” Mr Lavrov told RT, an international TV channel controlled by the Russian state.
“You can take the United States – only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view,” he added.
“But when you watch other channels and when you watch [and] read social networks, and internet platforms, when [the] acting president was was blocked as you know, and this censorship continues in [a] very big way,” Mr Lavrov said, possibly referring to then-President Donald Trump’s social media bans following the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021.
“Whenever something is happening, by the way of mass protest, mass demonstrations, which they don’t like, they immediately call it domestic terrorism,” Mr Lavrov claimed. “It’s a war which involves the methods of information terrorism. There is no doubt about this.”
Mr Lavrov, who has been in his post since 2004, said that Russia is a “very, very small player in [the] international information war” in comparison to “the Americans, the Brits, Anglo Saxons, in general, and of course the Germans, the French, and others”.
Between 1994 and 2004, Mr Lavrov served as the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations.
He told RT that “the quality” of western media was “another matter”. He singled out CNN as preferring to “avoid analytical materials ... and more concentrate on some reports which would be made of slogans – ‘Russia is an aggressor’, ‘Russia is murdering civilians’, ‘Russia is abusing sports’ and so on and so forth.”
Russia is undeniably considered to be the aggressor in the war with Ukraine because of its unprovoked invasion of the country.
Extensive reporting has shown that Russia is and has been killing civilians, often by intensively shelling residential areas as well as humanitarian corridors meant for evacuations.
Russia has also been banned from several Olympic Games because of its state-sponsored doping scheme.
“When they concentrate on TikTok and other resources like this and other platforms and when they target kids because TikTok is about young boys and girls. I believe this is an attempt to brainwash them for the rest of their life,” Mr Lavrov said. “This is indecent and not fair.”
“If you want competition among media outlets, then there must be some rules,” he added.
The Russian government has clamped down hard on independent media and reporting in Russia, passing a law making reporting the truth about the war punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Mr Lavrov went on to say that “we never had any issue with the Ukrainian people. I have many Ukrainian friends. The two peoples are very close culturally. Practically all of them speak [Russian].”
He added that they share a “common history, way of life, attitude to life,” and “traditions of families and communities”.
“So I hope that when this anomaly is over, this will gradually come back, it will have to be gradual,” Mr Lavrov said.
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