The chairperson of Bulgaria’s media watchdog, The Council for Electronic Media (CEM), who was appointed from the president’s quota – recently gave a scandalous interview. Commenting on the Russian propaganda in the country, Sonia Momchilova stated that at the same time there is propaganda in the opposite direction. As a guest on the Counter-Comment with Asen Genov podcast, she gave the example of the massacres in the town of Bucha near Kyiv in the spring of 2022. In response to the presenter's question, "Is there Russian propaganda and Russian influence through the media in Bulgaria?" Momchilova answered that it is possible in some media. "It is very delicate. When we are at war, yes, there is a certain position adopted by the European community and a certain tone of reflection of everything that we learn from the theater of military operations. But we should not change that to seek the truth. Because just as there is Russian propaganda, so we can't deny that there is also in the opposite direction - you know about Putin's illness, about him being replaced, dead, Bucha, etc. We still don't know, we can't judge without the sufficient historical distance how far the truth has perished, which is always the first casualty in war."

It was not clear from her interview what Ukrainian disinformation she had detected on the topic of the massacre in the first months of the Russian occupation in Bucha - and if she thought that false claims were being spread, why she did not refer the CEM to request sanctions against their spreaders.

Instead, she complained that "mainstream media is politically correct" and lamented that "we've lost a lot of the brightest faces" of journalism — pointing to people like Tucker Carlson, fired from Fox News for knowingly spreading falsehoods about alleged elections, scams in the US, and CNN's Don Lemon, who lost his job after making offensive comments about female politicians like Nikki Haley and his colleagues.

After Bucha was liberated from the occupying Russian forces at the end of March last year, a large number of mass graves with the bodies of dead civilians were found there, a large number of these people were tortured before their death. During the Russian occupation, which lasted 33 days, more than 1400 Ukrainian residents were killed in Bucha and the surrounding area, including 37 children. More than 175 bodies were found in mass graves and torture chambers. The city has become a symbol of the atrocities of Putin's army. International investigators also identified the Russian units that participated in the murders and atrocities against civilians in the city.

Momchilova also presented other puzzling views - she does not think that BNR host Petar Volgin propagates "neither Putin's ideology nor the Kremlin doctrine " and specifically defended his show, for which the presenter was punished by the BNR for spreading false information, declaring it a "truth search".

For reference: in April 2022, during the hostage crisis with Bulgarian sailors on the Tsarevna ship in Mariupol, Volgin had retold a false message of the Russian state news agency TASS that the ship had been captured by the Ukrainian Azov battalion.

His information was immediately refuted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense, but the CEM refused to sanction him because the regulator had no express powers to punish for disinformation.

"Should we encourage the journalist to search for the truth or wait for the official official information so as not to be politically incorrect?" - asked Sonia Momchilova rhetorically.

She repeated the controversial arguments with which several members of CEM refuse to deal with the lack of pluralism in Volgin's broadcast - namely, that "there is an analogous edition on Sunday, with the same name, but which is hosted by Silvia Velikova and sounds in a different way".

"How should we divide it chronologically so that pluralism is present? Shall Silvia Velikova and Petar Volgin enter five minutes apart? Three minutes each? At 15 each?" - she commented.

In fact, the Law on Radio and Television does not give much room for interpretation of the way in which BNT and BNR are obliged to present a diversity of opinions.

The public media are obliged to "reflect the different ideas and beliefs in society through a plurality of viewpoints in each of the news and current affairs programs with political and economic themes ". Silvia Velikova herself selects her topics and interlocutors at her editorial discretion, without being obliged to make a show "antithesis" to Volgin - which would be absurd.

Momchilova nevertheless referred to the existence of a "loyal and extremely large audience" of Petar Volgin (it was not clear what data she was referring to), as well as to the counter-complaints from the BSP and "Vazrazhdane" that "the media were very pro-Ukrainian and not the Russian point of view was advocated".

One of her most controversial theses - which she stressed was her personal opinion - was her attack on BNT and BNR journalists who are members of non-governmental associations.

Although she refused to name specific names or NGOs, it eventually became clear that she was referring to associations critical of the media landscape, such as the Association of European Journalists or Reporters Without Borders, which "put us in rankings, do polls, somehow influence the labor market".

"Journalists who work for non-governmental organizations and earn fees many times higher than their remuneration in the public media - from my point of view it is very debatable how moral it is to work and be voices and faces... it is not illegal, it is not prohibited. Including in a number of countries it is not prohibited. But from my personal point of view it is not that moral. It affects objectivity. It creates an automatism, if you will, in speaking and behaving. It corresponds to the interests of individual formations from the civil sector. And at the end of the edges get in the way. It gets in the way," said Momchilova and declared herself in favor of "adjusting the remuneration of the people who work there".

Her refusal to speak with specific names and examples was explained by the position she occupies: "I am talking about addictions, which I will be able to talk about more freely and with more examples, probably, when I am not the chairman of the CEM".

She has held this post since April 2022, and was previously nominated as a member of the regulator from the Rumen Radev quota in July 2021.

To Genov's repeated questions to Momchilova about her opinion on the European Commission's assessment of the penetration of Russian disinformation into the EU - with specific examples of the Kremlin's distortion of the truth about the war in Ukraine - the chairman of the CEM refused to answer in substance.

On the contrary - she stated that she "absolutely does not agree" that the Bulgarian media is a "conductor of Kremlin interests and information".

The conversation went to an even more surreal finale after Assen Genov reminded her of her ironic comment on Facebook about the "legitimization of over 30 genders" in the EU and asked her to say in which European directive she found such a thing.

Momchilova made a reservation that she tried to joke, but continued to insist that they "removed the toilets for men and women" and legitimized the rights of transgender people in sports.