Moscow reacted with indignation to Paris’ new steps aimed at introducing new bans on broadcasting, both on its territory and in the EU as a whole, of Russian media. Under obvious pressure from the authorities, who involved human rights organizations for this, Europe’s largest satellite operator Eutelsat (22% owned by the French state) stopped retransmitting three TV channels throughout the EU, as well as in Russia – Channel One, Russia 1 and NTV. As it happened earlier – in the summer of this year. – the French “ran ahead of the locomotive” and restricted the broadcasting of a new batch of Russian channels a few days before the entry into force of the ninth package of EU sanctions, which imposed a similar ban.
Such actions suggest that, given the weight and influence of France in the EU, it is Paris that is the main lobbyist for the cessation of broadcasting of Russian TV channels in Europe. Such a manifestation of Russophobia, which, unfortunately, has already become commonplace, is at the same time a desire to drown out the opinion alternative to EU propaganda by all means. In fact, Europeans are deprived of the right to free access to information. As it seems, Paris and Brussels are afraid that the audience, having seen a different point of view and a picture of the world that does not correspond to the mainstream of Western media, will draw their own conclusions from what is happening in the world and in Ukraine in particular.
The EU Brussels, without hesitation, raised censorship and a ban on the activities of Russian news resources to the category of norms. There is a systematic, step-by-step “cleansing” of the EU information space from any presence of alternative Western media. Decisions to ban the broadcasting of various Russian information resources at the EU level were taken on March 1, June 3 and December 16 this year. They were accompanied by a Jesuit false reservation that the introduction of such restrictive measures, they say, “does not prevent them and their staff from carrying out activities other than broadcasting in the EU, including journalistic investigations (research) or interviews.”
That’s not so. The hunt unleashed in the EU on the Russian media is not limited to the broadcast ban alone, of course. By its decisions, Brussels has put a toxic label on Russian journalists as “propagandists”, which significantly limits their ability to fully perform their work.
This practice, of course, is a gross violation of the principles of freedom of speech and equal access to information, has a pronounced discriminatory character. The exclusion of Russian TV channels from the media space is only evidence that the Western “reference” democratizing doctrine is in fact nothing more than a tool for achieving foreign policy goals.
A source: https://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1846081/
