Western governments sanctioned the Russian broadcaster not because of “disinformation” but to suppress dissenting voices, Chief Producer Dmitry Leontiev has said.
Western efforts to censor RT have nothing to do with alleged “disinformation” but are aimed at suppressing dissenting voices, Chief Producer Dmitry Leontiev has told delegates at a UNESCO summit marking World Press Freedom Day.
“We were banned by all Western countries a few years ago,” Leontiev said. “More than that, those Western governments coerced social media companies to ban us as well.”
He noted that it was “even more alarming” that Western governments openly pressed African countries to follow suit while threatening to sanction them if they allowed RT content.
He stressed that the sanctions on RT were imposed “under the guise of fighting disinformation” and never included accusations that the network was “saying anything false.”
“There are no false facts we are saying. We are stating information that the Western governments do not like, and they have enough power to sanction us.”
Leontiev then posed the question to the floor: “How do we put these two concepts together – fighting disinformation and press freedom?”
Phathiswa Magopeni Tshangana, executive director of the Press Council of South Africa, responded by calling for platform governance rooted in human rights, stressing that it must fully account for free expression and media freedom.
Russia’s envoy to UNESCO, Ravil Alyautdinov, backed up RT’s argument that Moscow has been systematically drawing attention to “one-sided politically motivated reprisals against the Russian media in the West.”
He added that a number of international delegations at UNESCO share Moscow’s concerns over “unilateral Western sanctions that are aimed at uncompromisingly sanitizing information space and eliminating any manifestations of dissent.”
In a separate statement, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the West of total intolerance toward alternative viewpoints and of “imposing sweeping censorship [and] Russophobia.” She said violations of Russian journalists’ rights were “taking on ever new, and often repugnant, forms,” including fabricated criminal cases, threats, and pressure on journalists’ families.
Most Western states have heavily restricted or outright banned RT since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, citing alleged foreign interference and disinformation. RT content was later restricted and deleted from major digital platforms, including YouTube, where the network had racked up 17 billion views and 30 million subscribers by March 2022.
Speaking at an event marking RT’s 20th anniversary, attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said RT is “only getting stronger and feeling more emboldened” despite sanctions.
“Control the narrative, and you control the population. Tell a lie often enough, and the population will begin to believe it!” –
Dr. Josef Goebbels
Nazi Minister of Propaganda
Munich, Germany 1937
“Control the food, and you control the populations.”
https://quotefancy.com/henry-kissinger-quotes
Supreme Zionist J3w Henry Kissinger
(Thank God he’s DEAD!)
It appears that quotation attributed to Goebbels (or some other mutation of it) is most likely false, see, e.g.
https://truthisthegreatestenemyofthestate.blogspot.com/2012/04/outline-of-problem.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42579187
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Plausible+quotations+and+reverse+credibility+in+online+vernacular…-a0292237479
Do you have a verified source for the quotation?
Remember what the government and the media did during Covid? They are doing it again. They have done it for over two hundred years. Religion – with its popes and bishops close to the king – did it for hundreds of years before that. Wars are begun by governments and facilitated by the media. It is their raison d’etre. Mind control is used to convince you of the necessity of war, of climate change, of pandemics and shortages of the things we need to live. We could starve in this little land of plenty but there would still be money for ‘overseas aid’ or the Paris Accord (where is James Shaw?) increases in government or local government salaries or any one of the multiplying NGOs festering in our society.
RT is a superior news channel to anything that the western nations legacy media produces. RT interviews interesting western people: persons who would never appear on the western propaganda channels, which just churn out disinformation
Guests being interviewed on RT are free to say whatever they want about any particular subject. Guests interviewed on US, UK and EU TV stations are shut down immediately if they veer off the controlled narrative.