The Media is the Message - Russian Presidential Candidate Calls Out RFE/RL for Being CIA Mouthpieces

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Ex-Russian presidential candidate Sobchak lashes out at ‘CIA officers’ running

US state media RFE/RL after top journalist fired

8 Dec 2020 09:31

FILE PHOTO © Sputnik / Ekaterina Chesnokova

Journalist, liberal society fixture, and former presidential candidate Kseniya Sobchak has launched a blistering attack on US state media operating in Russia, after it fired a journalist for “criticizing Alexey Navalny.”

“The real VGTRK [Russia’s state broadcasting company] is now in Prague,” said of Current Time TV’s parent company RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). “Of course, there is no longer any free press in America – at least for foreign markets. So, shame on Current Time.”

On December 3, Timur Olevsky was sacked after publicly discussing a conspiracy theory that Navalny’s now-deceased father-in-law had been a security services agent living in London. Olevsky apologized to the well-known opposition activist, but lost his job in any case, for digging into the family’s private life.

“Olevsky is a noble man,” Sobchak wrote on Telegram. “And those old ex-CIA officers who rule Current Time and Radio Liberty are not.”

Sobchak accused the US government-run outlet of “firing their most famous journalist for criticizing Navalny,” and thereby “throwing a bone to the dumbest propaganda.”

According to the former socialite, Olevsky did nothing wrong by “blurting out” stories about Navalny, likening the activist’s very private social life to that of President Vladimir Putin.

In her post, Sobchak lambasted the Prague-based US-government mouthpiece for being worse than VGTRK, the broadcaster of most of the country’s most popular TV channels. She also took aim at the editor-in-chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan.

Sobchak is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St. Petersburg and erstwhile ally of Putin. In the early 2000s, she was known as the host of reality show ‘Dom-2’. She quit the program in 2012, turning away from low-brow entertainment and towards serious journalism, and eventually hosted a show on liberal TV Rain and MTV Russia. In 2018, she ran in the country’s presidential election, coming fourth. Sobchak is now the host of a wildly successful YouTube show, which regularly garners a million views per episode.