A second Russia Today correspondent has quit her job, saying the Kremlin-funded station's anchors "do work for" Russian President Vladimir Putin and lied on-air to the public.
London reporter Sara Firth announced her resignation nearly two hours after taking to Twitter in a conversation with Russia Today's London correspondent Polly Boiko,
The Huffington Post reported.
Firth said the network asks its anchors to "obscure the truth," and that she'd had enough.
Special:
This Little-Known Website Can Erase $100,000 of Debt
The conversation popped up after another Twitter user complained to Boiko about the network's coverage of after a suspected
surface-to-air missile brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur:
When Boiko asked Tanos what she is spreading, Firth popped in with a tweet accusing the London anchor — and herself — of lying on a daily basis, saying:
She told
The Press Gazette in London that she made her decision to quit Thursday after
her newsroom's response to the reports about the deadly plane crash.
"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 said. "And I walked into the newsroom and they were running an eyewitness account of God-knows who the person was blaming the Ukrainian government, and it is such a volatile situation."
Firth, who has been with Russia Today since 2009,
told BuzzFeed Friday that the organization's coverage of the crash 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.' "
But the prior plane crash wasn't "worth mentioning," Firth said.
“I couldn’t do it any more," Firth said. "Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.”
Earlier this year, former Russia Today correspondent
Liz Wahl quit while she was on the air, saying she couldn't support a network that "whitewashes the actions of Putin" while asking her to "promote Russian foreign policy."
Special: Billionaires Are Quietly Buying These 5 Stocks