With the EU plan talking about Russia's "misuse" of mass communications tools, Brussels-based newspaper EUobserver went further, charging "some Russian media, such as RT or Sputnik [with] broadcasting fabrications and hate speech from their bureaus in EU cities."
Commenting on the plans and commentary, Slobodan Reljic, former editor-in-chief of esteemed weekly news magazine NIN, told Sputnik that with Russian media achieving considerable popularity among European audiences, "the West's attack on Russian media was only a matter of time."
"The West shouts loudly about competition," Reljic stated. "But when Western media begins to lose out to someone else, they do not tolerate such competition."
According to the veteran journalist, "the bottom line is that Western media creates for itself the image of being independent and free, but in reality it's a propaganda machine, which takes an active role in all the major forms of economic and political manipulation."
In Reljic's view, now "the time has come for war propaganda, and Western media have been turned into a weapon in their own right. In principle there is nothing new here. The only distinction is that this transformation is occurring more and more openly."
