NOPE. Definitely not
The End of Russia Today
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Illustration by Erik Carter
"It
was easy to make fun of RT America. Funded by the Russian government,
the English-language news outlet seemed to worry little about
journalistic standards and often engaged in bald propaganda. Now that
it’s gone, it’s hard to mourn it. But the closure of RT America also
signals the end of an era of more open communication between Russia and
the United States. On episode 45 of The Politics of Everything,
hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss the aims of Russia’s
experiment in American news, the grim transformation of Russian politics
over the past two decades, and what’s to come. Guests include Ben
Judah, the author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin, and Peter Pomerantsev, the author of This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.
Laura Marsh: It sounded almost like a familiar story in media. A TV station with a big news website starts in the mid-2000s. The station never attracts as many viewers as it’s supposed to, and the funding gets cut off. The station goes out of business, and most of the staff lose their jobs. Except this case was different, because the TV station is Russia Today, or RT America. Its funding came from the Russian government, and it shut down in the first week of March, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Alex Pareene: The station’s management described the closure as a result of “unforeseen business interruption events.”
Laura: Cable providers have cut ties with RT, and in Europe, YouTube, TikTok, and Meta all blocked RT content.
Alex: RT had been a platform for speakers and views from the right and, perhaps especially, the left that are rarely heard on mainstream American TV news. It was Larry King’s last professional home and the comedian Dennis Miller’s, as well. As an American TV news outlet, it was unusual. As a foreign propaganda effort, it was more conventional.
Laura: If we think of misinformation as being subtle, RT was the opposite.
Alex: This week on the show, we’re talking about Russia’s experiment with American news.
Laura: What was it meant to accomplish? How did Russia change over RT’s lifespan?
Alex: And what comes next? I’m Alex Pareene.
Laura: And I’m Laura Marsh.
Alex: This is The Politics of Everything.
Laura: Peter Pomerantsev is a journalist who spent several years living and working in Moscow. He’s the author of two books on Russian disinformation and propaganda, and we thought he could explain to us what RT was all about. Hi, Peter, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Peter Pomerantsev: My pleasure.
Laura: We’re talking about Russia Today. RT was launched in 2005. What was its stated mission, and why was it created?
Peter: RT was initially created with the mission of being Russia’s kind of public diplomacy–state information channel, a bit like Deutsche Welle, the German one, which is tied to the state but pretty independent, or I guess a little bit like Voice of America or something. Officially, Russia felt that it needed its own voice internationally, and a lot of the content right at the start was really quite anodyne. It was just, you know, here’s a travel show about Russia, here’s the world news, but we interviewed a Russian official about it not an American one. A perfectly legitimate bit of statecraft that most big countries did.
Alex: You mentioned Voice of America; this is something that is not out of the ordinary for a country to have: state media broadcasting internationally.
Peter: Yeah, Deutsche Welle would be a better comparison, because Voice of America is housed outside of government and inside something called USAGM, which has institutional barriers between itself and the state. So Deutsche Welle or France24, as well, which is literally the culture ministry; its TV channel is funded directly, not through Congress and various other things.
Laura: If you took the stories that were broadcast on Russia Today at face value, what kind of image did it project of Russia?
Peter: So just at the start, it was all about countering this image of Russia as a country of drunks and potholes and prisons and saying, “Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.” That’s perfectly legitimate. It was meant to be news about Russia. But then from 2008, it pivoted very hard, and after the invasion of Georgia it became something completely different, and it becomes very much a tool of Russian political warfare. It was a way of basically tapping into various narratives of discontent in Western societies—and not just Western, also Middle Eastern, also Latin American, and shaping them in line with the priorities of Russian foreign policy. For example, in Germany, they targeted the anti-vaxxers. They would do lots of conspiracies about vaccines to get in with that group in society and then feed them disinformation about Syria and Ukraine.
Alex: And it was around the time of the shift you identify that they launched RT America here in the states. And what was interesting was, as you said, there was very little content about Russia on RT America, for the most part. They had a lot of voices on that you would identify with the American political left, often discussing domestic issues. What benefit did that have for Russian foreign policy? Why would that be a messaging strategy that they would have pursued in the United States?
Peter: In the United States, the Russians generally have been cultivating the far right and business elites and the far left—I mean, you just basically look at whichever elements of society are important and open to your messaging. The far left criticizes American imperialism, and that’s very useful for Russia. So it’s not a hard sell. Whether they have any meaning in American politics, I don’t know. I think the far right—the Bannon far right, and now the Tucker Carlson far right—are much more meaningful.
Laura: How do you see Russia Today as fitting into a broader Russian propaganda strategy? Because obviously this is just one outlet, and it’s a pretty traditional way of doing propaganda, having a TV station.
Peter: I don’t think as a TV station it was effective in Europe or America. I think, in a sense, where it was effective was online. That means, for example, targeting content in very, very specific ways to very specific audiences. But also, more than that, being part of this whole network of fake online accounts, websites that look genuine but aren’t, and putting themselves in that network, which first obviously helps with diffusion of their messaging but, maybe more important, starts to game the Google algorithm and, sort of, the stories. So the digital operation was meant to be much more effective than the broadcast one, where they’re, I think, not very impressive.
Laura: One of the reasons that we were interested in doing an episode on this is that you can look at Russia Today in a serious way and say, “This was a project of the Russian government,” but it’s also really hard to look at RT and take it seriously, because I don’t think it was ever taken seriously by a large number of people. It’s kind of ridiculous, right, because it’s so openly biased.
Peter: Unlike the rest of American TV?
Laura: Wow! We can definitely have that conversation.
Alex: I think that’s what I found interesting about it, though. Because I think it’s a projection of the Russian government’s really firm belief in the complete hypocrisy of the West, in that, “Your television stations are just propaganda, so it shouldn’t really matter if ours is unconvincing propaganda,” almost.
Do you think there’s anything to that? . ."
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