After London’s BBC published alleged quotations of RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, yesterday she said that BBC is deserving of a defamation lawsuit in a Russian court. Yesterday, Simonyan called the BBC article “British propaganda in all its glory and originality.” Referring to the spurious quotations in the original attack, she said: “Of course, I never said anything like this. But I think I’ll sue the BBC. They have a bureau in Moscow, let them eat a little dust.”
The BBC has now deleted the phony quotations, with no other explanation than that the “comments attributed to Margarita Simonyan” were “incorrectly translated.” It remains unclear why, if the BBC had only made a series of imprecise translations, they would not have simply corrected the translations—as opposed to simply removing them in full from their article.
The BBC had weighed in with all guns firing on Sept. 5 with their feature “Who Is Margarita Simonyan?”, in tandem with Washington’s accusation against and sanction of Simonyan for attempts to interfere in the U.S. election. The article is credited to Kateryna Khinkulova, said to be one of BBC’s Ukrainian employees, but a graduate of the London School of Economics and Politics. One can still read their typical formulations, such as, Simonyan “has been described as the Kremlin’s top propagandist and ideologue, almost more Putinist than the Russian president himself.” Khinkulova retreads the characterization without bothering to cite who provided such “objective” insight.