The Azerbaijani government’s Media Development Agency released a statement on Tuesday decrying the spread of fake news about the country. The statement cited recent false stories that had gone viral — that Azerbaijan would withdraw from the Eurovision song contest if Israel is banned and that Azerbaijan has been supplying Ukraine with weapons via Sudan.
The agency called the stories ‘disinformation’ and called on ‘the international community, media resources, journalists, and public activists […] to uphold a principled stance against such cases’.
To say this was rich coming from them is an understatement. The world of pro-government media in Azerbaijan is one of the most toxic environments I’ve ever seen, and I read Russian state-run news everyday. It is full of disinformation, grievances, and no-holds-barred attacks on perceived opponents of Baku, all of which are juxtaposed against glowing coverage of Azerbaijan, describing the country as a utopia and its leaders as deified geniuses.
On Tuesday — the same day the agency released its statement warning about the dangers of disinformation — the prominent Azerbaijani pro-government media outlet Caliber published a lengthy ‘exposé’ on French President Emmanuel Macron.
A brief bit of background — the Azerbaijani government and its associated media outlets have a longstanding beef with Macron (and really with France in general), which they claim is because of their oh-so-sincere distaste for France’s colonial history. In reality, everyone knows that the source of the problem is France’s support for Armenia.
The Caliber article was entitled ‘Macron’s horrible year is bound to get even worse’, and featured none other than one of the most notorious Holocaust-denying antisemitic conspiracy theorists in the US, Candace Owens.
Currently, Owens is embroiled in a legal dispute with Macron because she claims, for some reason, that Macron’s wife Brigitte is actually a man. Previously, she said that Macron is gay and ‘married to a trans man who molested him as a child’.
Caliber’s article is full of other absurd theories about connections between the Macrons and the Rothschilds, incest, corruption, pedophilia, and other nonsense that I won’t even bother to elaborate on.
This is not an isolated incident — Caliber and other media outlets routinely smear Macron and France. But this alone doesn’t even include Azerbaijan’s bizarre obsession with the independence movement in the French overseas colony of New Caledonia, where Baku has been accused of helping foment deadly riots in 2024.
These same media outlets also peddle disinformation and other attacks on American politicians, including California Senator Adam Schiff, often citing conspiracy theories that come from the Republican Party, which also dislikes him (but for different reasons).
Again, the obsession with Schiff is, without question, because he is considered to be a supporter of Armenia. Ironically, if Caliber had bothered to do their homework, they would have found that Candace Owens is also a supporter of Armenia, and has regularly criticised Azerbaijan.
These outlandish smear campaigns are not a sign of a healthy media ecosystem, and they are not compelling evidence of a country ostensibly focused on peace.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan have initialled a peace treaty and said that the conflict is over.
It’s time for Azerbaijani media to reflect that.
