We continue with our weekly analysis of the main talking points of Russian TV’s Sunday news review programs. The three flagship shows — Voskresnoye Vremya [The Times on Sunday], Vesti Nedeli [Weekly News] and Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyev — are together watched by tens of millions every week. This week’s coverage of international affairs focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential elections and allegations that they will be rigged in favor of one of the candidates.



Election fraud was a hot issue on Russia’s Sunday evening news programs. No, not fraud in September’s Duma elections or the upcoming Russian presidential elections, but rather in November’s U.S. presidential elections.



On Rossiya 24’s "Weekly News," presenter Dmitry Kiselyov accused the American press of corrupting the presidential election by accepting favors from the Clinton campaign’s staff. Kiselyov introduced the story by telling viewers that, in the final lap of the electoral race, one candidate had alleged that the election results may be falsified and suggested he might not recognize them. Kiselyov was referring to Donald Trump’s comments at Tuesday’s presidential debate, the last debate before the November election.



Kiselyov then played a clip from the debate showing Trump lashing out at the “dishonest media” without Russian dubbing or subtitles, leaving a large portion of Kiselyov’s audience clueless as to what the candidate had said.



Based on these comments, Kiselyov claimed that U.S. elections could be judged by the same formula that the U.S. has judged other nations’ elections — not transparent, lacking competition, mass falsification, and carried out using the resources of the incumbent administration.



“They can’t be called free and democratic,” Kiselyov told his viewers.



Kiselyov explained that Trump’s concerns were related to states which have early voting and lack voter I.D. laws. The audience was then shown a clip of Trump claiming that about 1.8 million dead people are allegedly still on voter rolls. Kiselyov then mentioned that the U.S. refused to allow international election observers, “specifically from Russia.”



What he failed to point out is that the U.S. is allowing election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the U.S. State Department invited Russian observers to join the OSCE election monitoring mission. The invitation was declined by Russia, however, which wanted to monitor the elections with their own mission.