RT employee poses as resident of heatless Russian apartment and gives fake interview to discredit TV Rain
Konstantin Pridybailo, a correspondent for the Russian state media network RT, posed as a resident of Lipetsk and gave a fake interview to the independent news channel TV Rain about the city’s recent heating outage in an effort to discredit the outlet.
“The media foreign agent TV Rain has once again demonstrated its ‘professionalism,’ airing unverified information that turned out to be a prank by a user of the social media site X,” the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Minpravdy” wrote after the incident. A clip from the TV Rain segment shared by “Minpravdy” shows Pridybailo telling a made-up story about how he and a neighbor had to huddle around a charcoal grill to keep warm.
Pridybailo confessed to the hoax on X (formerly Twitter), writing:
@tvrain aired my hastily-made fake story without a second thought. The extremists were searching for a Lipetsk resident who would tell them about the buildings that lost heating. I decided to teleport there. I wrote to their bot that me and a neighbor used a grill in an apartment building to get warm. They showed it.
TV Rain editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko acknowledged on Telegram that the network aired unverified information, calling it an “unfortunate story and an unfortunate mistake.” He said the newsroom would discuss the incident to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“Pridybailo couldn’t think of anything better than having some fun with the topic of the people in a number of Russian regions who are freezing — freezing because money was allocated to Pridybailo’s own salary, rather than to the maintenance of public utilities,” Dzyadko added. “What could be more fun than making up fake news about people freezing in Lipetsk, right?”
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