Rick Sanchez slams BBC and CNN over college massacre site no-show (VIDEO)
CNN and the BBC should have visited the site of a deadly Ukrainian drone strike on a college dormitory in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) if they say they distrust Moscow’s narrative about the attack, US journalist Rick Sanchez has said.
Kiev struck a teacher training college dormitory in Starobelsk with several waves of UAVs on Friday, killing 21 people – most of them teenage girls – and injuring 65 others.
Sanchez, who used to work for MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and now hosts the Sanchez Effect program on RT, was among some 50 foreign journalists from 19 countries who visited the site of the attack this weekend. CNN and the BBC rejected the offer to send correspondents on a trip to the LPR at the invitation of the Russian authorities.
The US journalist said that he came to Starobelsk and saw for himself that the Ukrainian claims that there were Russian military installations near the affected college and the dorm were false.
“I don’t believe the Russian Foreign Ministry, right? I want to hear it from the people there… And that’s why you come here. The BBC should have come here asking those questions. CNN should have come here asking those questions,” he said.
According to Sanchez, it was “frustrating” to see the Western media ignoring the attack on the Russian dormitory and only focusing on Moscow’s retaliatory strikes against Ukrainian military targets, which included the deployment of hypersonic intermediate-range Oreshnik missiles.
“How do you legitimately say, ‘I am a journalist’ if you don’t cover one story, but you cover another story?” he wondered.
RT senior correspondent Murad Gazdiev, who was among the journalists with whom Sanchez discussed the decision of the BBC and CNN not to visit Starobelsk, insisted that it was a “statement” on the part of the Western outlets.
They basically said: “we aren’t interested. We’re only interested in any potential civilian casualties on the side that we support. The side that we don’t support - screw them,” Gazdiev explained.
Irish journalist Chay Bowes, who hosts the Moscow Mules show on RT, noted that “the same money that funds the BBC, buys the weapons from the US now and hands them to this dictatorship in Kiev.”
Iranian reporter Christopher Helali from DD Geopolitics website agreed, saying that people working for the BBC and CNN “aren’t journalists. They’re stenographers. They’re not free.”
