Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief who runs the news channel Russia Today, talked about many topics, from the reason behind the war in Ukraine to the possible LGBTQ+ propaganda in the popular American sitcom Friends. Scroll below to find out what she has said.
Back in 1994, when the American sitcom Friends started to air on television, the topics that they covered over the years in the episodes, were something new at that time. However, now in an interview, a Russian TV’s editor blamed the sitcom for the start of ‘boiling ultra-liberal borshcht’ and showing the difference between East and West cultures.
In a video shared by Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, took to his Twitter handle and shared a clip where Margarita Simonyan can be seen talking about the Ukraine war and blamed the sitcom Friends for allegedly spreading the propaganda. In the translated video, she can be seen saying, “You had to have very good eyesight to notice it in the 1994 TV series Friends, for example, which is probably the most popular American TV series of all time, such a personification of American culture.”
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Further talking about the first scene of Friends where Ross looks sad as his wife left him for another woman, Margarita Simonyan said, “His wife left, left for a woman, discovering after several years of marriage that she was a lesbian. And all this is shown so sympathetically: she seems to be right but he is not quite right. This is 1994. It was also impossible to notice frenzied propaganda in this, because it was so rare, so fresh, so interesting. And now we have what we have. And we will not jump over this [gulf]. We’ll either save ourselves—the way we have to do it now, or we’ll be there.”
As per a report in Newsweek, they have contacted NBC, the channel that first aired Friends to make a comment on that, but they have not responded yet. Now while talking about Ukraine War, Simonyan blamed Friends as she wanted to state that the sitcom showed pro-LGBTQ+ propaganda and their portrayal showed a huge difference in East and West cultures. In Russia, LGBTQ+ people often face the wrath of legal and social challenges.
On October 27, Russian lawmakers have even filed and voted for a bill that forbids spreading “propaganda of non-traditional s*xual relations” to minors and adults. They even had a poll in 2021 that revealed 38 percent of Russians were “disgusted or scared” of homos*xuals, 32 per cent were “calm, without any specific emotions.” While a 13 per cent people were irritated by gay people and 3 per cent felt “friendly” towards them.