Russia Says Fox News Should Apologize over Insulting Putin

Kremlin described it “unacceptable” that one of the channel’s anchors had insulted the President Vladimir Putin in an interview with US counterpart Donald Trump.
 
Trying to force the US president to back off from his support for his Russian counterpart, the Fox News host Bill O'Reilly described Putin as “a killer”.
 
"We consider such words from the Fox TV company to be unacceptable and insulting, and honestly speaking, we would prefer to get an apology from such a respected TV company," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.
 
However, O'Reilly defied Kremlin's call for apology and said "I'm working on that apology but it may take a little time. You might want to check in with me around ... 2023."
 
Fox News is a top-rated US cable news network owned by Rupert Murdoch's Twenty-First Century Fox Inc.
 
Big western media corporations try to undermine Trump’s admiration for his Russian counterpart as it could mean a closer cooperation between the two countries when many powerful lobbying groups oppose such closeness.
 
Trump, when commenting on the allegations against Putin in the same interview, questioned how "innocent" the United States itself was, saying it had made a lot of its own mistakes. That irritated some congressional Republicans who said there was no comparison between how Russian and US politicians behaved.