Russia's Zakharova Slams Western Media Claims of Underreported COVID-19 Cases in Russia

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th May, 2020) Allegations put forward by several Western media outlets about Russia downplaying the true number of its coronavirus-related fatalities is yet another "volley" of fake news and shows poor reporting standards, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday.

Financial Times, in particular, has claimed that the number of COVID-19 deaths is 70 percent higher than reported by the government, while The New York Times has alleged that Russia omitted some 1,700 deaths from the official statistics.

"I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it was a volley, it went off on May 10, 11, 12. And the central ones in this volley were two of the largest Western newspapers: the Financial Times and the New York Times," Zakharova told Russia's Rossiya 1 channel.

According to the spokeswoman, these articles are an obvious deviation from the traditional Western journalistic standard of presenting two sides of a story.

"What I see in these articles is, first of all, that they are clearly written by one hand and both use the same background materials � one can see it with a naked eye. But most importantly, Western journalists will never take only your point of view without contacting anyone else to ensure that the other side's opinion is represented to double-check the information, diversify their sources. As a rule, they use two or three sources," Zakharova said, adding that the articles by FT and NYT have failed to include the opinion of Moscow.

Earlier in the day, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova rejected that Russia ever manipulated the official coronavirus statistics.

WHO Representative in Russia Melita Vujnovic has earlier confirmed that there is no deliberate understatement of COVID-19 mortality in the country.