NYT article on RT host Abby Martin

[ProSense]

Critical Russia Today Host From ’9/11 Truth’ Movement

As my colleague Dan Bilefsky reported earlier, the host of a show on RT America, part of the Kremlin-owned news network Russia Today, surprised some viewers on Monday when she voiced on-air remarks critical of the Russian “occupation of Crimea.”

Since criticism of Kremlin policy on the government-owned network is less frequent than broadsides against the Republican Party from Fox News hosts, many observers of the propaganda battle between Russia and Ukraine were taken aback by the comments from Abby Martin, the American host of the media analysis show “Breaking the Set.” Others, including Glenn Greenwald, argued that Ms. Martin’s commentary “demonstrated last night what ‘journalistic independence’ means,” and undercut criticism that Russia Today is a Potemkin news network, set up only to give the appearance of a free press.

Although RT boasts on YouTube that it is the site’s most popular news source, video of Ms. Martin’s comments was not posted on the network’s main YouTube channel or that of her program...Martin’s comments were less surprising to viewers more familiar with her work as a commentator and antiwar activist whose animating obsession has been her conviction that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were part of a government conspiracy. Before she rose to prominence on television, she was an active member of what is known as the 9/11 Truth movement, whose members hold that the official history of the terrorist attacks is a cover for a concealed government conspiracy. In video posted on YouTube recorded during a 9/11 Truth march in Santa Monica, Calif. in 2008, she can be heard explaining that she concluded that the attacks were “an inside job” because “I’ve researched it for three years and every single thing that I uncover solidifies my belief that it was an inside job and that our government was complicit in what happened.”

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Last year, Ms. Martin also laid into Rachel Maddow for her discussion of a Wall Street Journal report that one of the Boston bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was influenced by “conspiratorial nonsense radicalism” like the 9/11 Truth movement.

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http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/latest-updates-on-ukraine-crisis-2/#critical-russia-today-host-in-911-truth-movement

Greenwald weighs in on Russia
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024602743

[NuclearDem]

1. Yes she is. She's also right about Crimea, and brave to be so on RT.

[ProSense]

2. It's highly likely

"Yes she is. She's also right about Crimea, and brave to be so on RT."

...that part of the reason she's on RT is the propaganda aspect of 9/11 trutherism.

UPDATE: Well that didn’t take long. RT, aka Russia Today, has censored its on-air host Abby Martin’s blistering critique of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Whodathunk the Kremlin wasn’t in favor of free speech? Sigh.

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Russia Today is one of the lead propaganda organs of the Russian government. It’s slick, and it’s as apologist about Russia as Fox News is about the Republican party. The difference being, of course, that Fox News isn’t the official network of the United States government. To call RT (the network calls itself RT instead of its former name “Russia Today,” presumably to help obscure its true mission) anti-American is an understatement.

So it’s curious that any American would go work for a TV network dedicated to bolstering a dictator. It’s even more curious that an American working for a Russian dictator would be outraged that her boss is acting like, you know, a dictator. But that’s what happened yesterday when Martin spoke out, on the air, about her opposition to the Russian invasion of Crimea. See video below.

- more -

http://americablog.com/2014/03/russian-state-media-host-blasts-russian-invasion-ukraine-video.html

There was also a report that she would be heading to Crimea, which she immediately shot down on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/AbbyMartin/status/440928406834659328

[X_Digger]

3. What a fruit loop she is. n/t

[ProSense]

4. Yes. n/t