Russia Today Reporter Resigns Over Plane Crash Coverage

Sara Firth

Sara Firth, who joined the channel in 2009, told BuzzFeed that she decided to resign from the Kremlin-funded news channel because she felt it was “disrespectfully” attempting to pin the blame for Thursday’s Malaysia Airlines disaster on the Ukrainian government.

“When this story broke I ran back into the newsroom and saw how we were covering it already and I just knew I had to go,” she said.

“It was the total disregard to the facts. We threw up eyewitness accounts from someone on the ground openly accusing the Ukrainian government [of involvement in the disaster], and a correspondent in the studio pulled up a plane crash before that the Ukrainian government had been involved in and said it was ‘worth mentioning’.

“I couldn’t do it any more. Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.”

I resigned from RT today. I have huge respect for many in the team, but I'm for the truth. pic.twitter.com/mZ1g0R7N0D
— Sara Firth (@Sara__Firth) July 18, 2014

Russia Today has been hit by high-profile staff resignations before, most spectacularly when anchor Liz Wahl resigned live on air earlier this year.

Firth, a Briton who graduated from City University in 2009, worked out of the news channel’s Moscow base initially, before coming to work in London. She claims that inexperienced staff would be assigned to important stories in order to ensure they did not go off-message.