A reporter in London working for the television show “Russia Today” has publicly resigned because she is furious about the station’s coverage of the Malaysia Airlines plane that was shot down in eastern Ukraine.
“I resigned from RT today. I have huge respect for many in the team, but I’m for the truth,” TV correspondent and photojournalist Sara Firth tweeted early Friday.
After the channel blatantly ignored the theory that the plane was brought down by a Russian-made missile fired by pro-Russian separatists, Firth said it was “the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” according to the British newspaper Press Gazette.
“Yesterday when the story broke you get the kick in your stomach when you’re going to get the facts and it’s this huge story,” she told the newspaper.
“I walked into the newsroom and they were running an eye-witness account of God-knows who the person was blaming the Ukrainian government, and it is such a volatile situation.”
Hours after the crash, Russian state television channel Rossiya 1 was reporting that a Ukrainian fighter pilot had possibly shot down the Boeing 777 after mistaking it for Vladimir Putin’s presidential plane returning from Brazil, Bloomberg News reports.
What they completely forgot to mention was that the Russian president had stopped flying over Ukrainian airspace when Russia annexed Crimea back in March.
Channel One, the most watched television channel in the country, reported that the pro-Russian rebels did in fact shoot down a plane, but not Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.
They then claimed that it was instead a Ukrainian warplane that fired upon the civilian passenger jet, using a woman only identified as “Tatiana” as their main witness.
She told the station that she had seen two different planes in the area at the time of the crash, Bloomberg News reports.
Russian officials including the speaker of parliament, Segei Naryshkin, are now claiming that Ukrainian aviation authorities acted in a “criminally negligent” way by allowing the Kuala Lumpur-bound flight to fly across an active war zone.
In addition, their most recent theory also fails to name or mention any suspects who may have actually fired the missile itself.
“RT style guide Rule 1: It is ALWAYS *Ukraine’s fault (*add name as applicable),” Firth tweeted before her resignation.
The London-based reporter is not the only “Russia Today” journalist to publicly resign from the network over ridiculous reporting.
Back in March, Washington-based anchor Liz Wahl announced on-air that she was leaving the station because she “could not be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashed the actions of Putin,” according to Politico.