Two senior resignations at Britain’s public broadcasting company, the BBC, over the weekend, sparked a gleeful response from the Kremlin and Russia’s state media on Monday.
BBC Director General Tim Davies and head of news Deborah Turness resigned over a misleading edit of US President Donald Trump in a program covering the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021.
The scandal began on Nov. 3, when British broadsheet The Telegraph published an article claiming that the public broadcaster had “doctored” the video to suggest that Trump had explicitly told protesters to attack the building.
According to Russian state media TASS, the Russian embassy in London called the BBC “a propaganda and disinformation tool” in a statement about the incident.
“Its journalists select and manipulate facts, censor information that does not fit into the biased stance of the leadership. As we can see, they do not hesitate to independently create and disseminate false claims.”
“We are confident that the time will come when the BBC bosses will have to answer for their Russophobia and publicly apologize for years and decades of slander about our country,” they added.
According to Newsweek, Kremlin spokesperson Maria Zakharova used the scandal to falsely accuse the BBC of falsifying their reporting of the massacre of hundreds of civilians by Russian troops in Bucha, near Kyiv, in the early days of the full-scale invasion.
Overwhelming forensic evidence and survivor testimony tells the story of the rape, torture, and summary execution of men, women, and children during the 33 days that Russian troops occupied the town.
“[The BBC] also invented incredible stories about Russian fans ahead of the Sochi Olympics, fakes about Syria, inflated absurd rumours about the Skripals, and much more,” Zakharova claimed, as per The Daily Star – referring to the poisoning of former Russian agent Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a military-grade nerve agent in the town of Salisbury, England.
The attack, carried out on British soil, was linked to Russian security services. It marked a serious deterioration of relations between Downing Street and the Kremlin.
In 2022, a US select committee published an 814-page report concluding that Trump had “engaged in a ‘multi-part conspiracy’ to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol,” as per PBS.
