Bloomberg: "Russia Today - Vladimir Putin's On-Air Media Machine"
Last edited Mon Jan 2, 2017, 09:21 PM - Edit history (1)
I occasionally see folks defending Russia Today or dismissing concerns about stories appearing on it as being equivalent to stories pushed by privately owned media outlets. "Hey, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. It's no different." Actually, it is different, and Russia itself understands the difference, since it has steadily passed laws restricting foreign ownership of Russian media on the grounds that such media outlets could be used to destabilize Russia:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/russia-advances-media-law-testing-pearson-springer
Conversely, with the 2016 election, we saw how Russian Hackers stole data from the Democrats, posted on WikiLeaks as a fence, then Russia Today immediately sorting and categorizing these e-mails to facilitate their use against Democrats. And, these efforts were successful in not only electing Trump, but also causing some Republicans to side with Russia and Trump and dismiss such hacking efforts as no big deal:
https://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/im-an-american-cnns-jim-sciutto-eviscerates-former-gop-rep-saying-russian-hacking-is-no-big-deal/
Put another, independent journalism is not only under threat from corporate ownership and centralization, but also from being coopted by foreign actors.
http://time.com/rt-putin/
It was just past midnight on Feb. 28 in the Moscow studios of RT, Russia’s state-funded international television news network, when word of the assassination reached the staff: Boris Nemtsov, a leading figure in the fractious opposition to President Vladimir Putin, had been shot dead a short walk from Red Square. Later that morning, Putin’s spokesman set the tone for RT’s coverage. “What goes without saying,” said Dmitri Peskov, “is that this is a 100% provocation.” His implication was clear: the Nemtsov shooting was staged by Russia’s enemies, not to silence the victim but to discredit the regime he opposed.
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Putin founded RT in 2005 with a budget of about $30 million and gradually ramped it up to more than $300 million per year by 2010. (By comparison, the BBC World Service Group, which includes TV, radio and online news distribution, has a budget of $376 million for 2014–15. The BBC’s International Service is the biggest broadcast newsgathering operation in the world.) The network has already gone a long way toward “breaking the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on global information streams,” as Putin instructed it to do during a visit to RT’s brand-new studios in Moscow in 2013. For him this project is about much more than vanity in an era when digital media are, as he unabashedly put it in October, “a formidable weapon enabling the manipulation of public opinion.”
It has proved formidable enough to put the West on the defensive. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry denounced RT last April as a “propaganda bullhorn” for Putin, accusing it of “distorting what is happening, or not happening, in Ukraine.” Western policymakers have increasingly debated the need for a more vigorous response, either with fresh funding for their own media outlets, such as Voice of America, or a new Russian-language channel to fight Putin on his own turf.
But experts warn that getting into a propaganda war with Russia will be self-defeating. The only way to counter misinformation, they say, is to doggedly stick to the facts. The aim of RT is to “inundate the viewer with theories about Western plots, to keep them dazed and confused,” says Peter Pomerantsev, a British expert on Russian propaganda. Trying to counter that RT-type spin with Western counter-spin would only serve to legitimize RT. That would only play into Putin’s hands.?w=380
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