The negative coverage of Russian affairs in the United Kingdom's press outlets is hindering the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce's (RBCC) efforts to persuade UK businesses to enter the Russian market, Alf Torrents, the chamber's executive chairman, told Sputnik in an interview
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th November, 2020) The negative coverage of Russian affairs in the United Kingdom's press outlets is hindering the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce's (RBCC) efforts to persuade UK businesses to enter the Russian market, Alf Torrents, the chamber's executive chairman, told Sputnik in an interview.
"What we've found is that all the businesses that are established in Russia, none of them leave because of the various road bumps. They know the market, it's a good market, but the difficulty we have is persuading new businesses to come because they see it from quite a colored perspective," Torrents said.
According to the RBCC's executive chairman, the UK media's coverage of Russian affairs often takes a negative tone, which is dissuading businesspeople from entering the Russian market.
"Businesses read the papers, and they see it through the political prism of the national press, and I think that's where it becomes more difficult because many of the stories that business in the UK reads about Russia tend to be very negative ... so when you're looking through a prism which is overwhelmingly negative, we know it puts a lot of businesses off," Torrents said, adding that international trade, even in the best of circumstances, has its difficulties.
In October 2019, the Rossiya Segodnya news agency published the findings of its study on the portrayal of Russia in Western media outlets. The study found that 50.6 percent of news stories about Russia published by UK press outlets were negative, compared to just 0.9 percent that portrayed Russia in a positive light.
Speaking in May, Russian Ambassador in London Andrei Kelin said that the UK press tends to leave everything positive concerning Russia "hushed up" by publishing only negative stories.
