Every large institution rectifies blatant misrepresentations about themselves in press conferences, including all governments of the world and all companies. It's weird to assume they shouldn't.

If it would be EU sponsored NGO doing this, you would argue it's a department of truth proxy wouldn't you?

Of course. I assume there are concerned citizens in the EU can do this. Why does the government need to get involved in this?

You're being silly. To take an extreme scenario, if the KGB is financing entities spouting non-sense in various publications, you expect the US/CIA to just take it lying down? :-)

It's part of intelligence/counter-intelligence, you have to control the narrative because the average citizen isn't well informed enough and will just end up believing what the other party tells them... because they're the only ones saying anything.

Private individuals can do this, but governments have been doing this too, since the beginning of time (and of governments).

So the Brexit to EU is like KGB to US? Why do you want to keep UK inside EU then?

I'm not keeping anything, anywhere. The UK can do whatever it wants, as far as I care.

I was just doing a reductio ad abusrdum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum) to show you that your logic was faulty.

You didn't. I proved your RU-US example did not fit in the context of UK-EU.

You proved how? Why would the EU not be allowed to publish things proving that what the UK newspaper articles are false?

Is there some sort of legal principle I'm missing that says that government entities are not allowed to defend themselves from lies?

I don't see a difference in paying the salary of people to do it in your name, or funding a NGO and indirectly paying the salary of the people who do the work.

The difference is whether the government gets involved.

This was just a blog as part of regular press work by the European Commission in the UK. Every organization does that in publications and press conferences. It's normal to publish press releases to correct misunderstandings or point out the view of your organization/company. The UK government does the very same, for instance.

But what exactly is authoritarian about this? It's not like this is the only truth?