![]() You try to do things like, oh, I just focus on culture and theater. So you kind of start to do the things that people did in the Soviet Union, where you try to walk a really fine line, and you work for this organization but you try not to do the really odious stories. The Russians who worked there, you know, there’s fewer and fewer jobs to go around there too, and that’s because the Kremlin is cracking down on independent media and forcing outlets to close or having them taken over by Kremlin-friendly oligarchs. The problem is that these people in Moscow, as I saw it, led pretty sheltered lives and didn't really understand the country around them very well. ![]() You know, go live in Russia, of all places, and you get to be on TV. And here comes Russia Today offering really fat paychecks and a really cool experience. JULIA IOFFE: They started hiring during a really intense media crisis in the West, and people were coming out of journalism schools with very dim job prospects. ![]() Surely they understand what the role of this organization is. And they called it "the United States of Swedamerica.”īOB GARFIELD: You did a piece where you interviewed staffers at Russia Today.īOB GARFIELD: And they said, yeah, we understand it’s not exactly a news organization, but the checks don't bounce. They had, for example, when Julian Assange - who is quite a complicated figure - when he was trying to be extradited to Sweden to face charges of sexual abuse, Russia Today did a long exposé about how Sweden had actually become a colony of the US, and they had some strange professor in Coke bottle glasses talking about how they were showing reruns of Deer Hunter on Swedish TV and this was proof. It’s like watching Colbert without the irony. But often, I find their coverage quite comical. And I find myself, for example, retweeting some of their breaking news. JULIA IOFFE: Well, they’re able to get access to people that other media doesn’t, so they were one of the first, for example, to broadcast a long interview with Bashar al-Assad, you know, obviously, drawing on their sponsor’s close ties to him. Was there a single mention of that on Russia Today? The answer is no.īOB GARFIELD: Is there any real news that kind of launders the propaganda that’s at the heart of the channel? Those protests were brutally broken up by police. Petersburg, when Putin asked for the authorization of the use of force in Ukraine. However, there were antiwar protests in Moscow and St. So, for example, Russia Today was all over covering antiwar protests in the US and in the West this summer, when there was a threat of Western military intervention in Syria, to show that Western governments kind of drag their own people in - kicking and screaming into war because, you know, that’s what the corrupt West does. They ignore the things that are not convenient. JULIA IOFFE: They love running stories about American homelessness, the American government and the British government spying on their own citizens, as if the rest of the media is not reporting critically on this. RT CORRESPONDENT: But the US turns a blind eye when it comes to provocative statements coming out of Kiev.īOB GARFIELD: Because Ukraine is such a threat to neighboring – wait, what? According to Julia Ioffe, senior editor at The New Republic, RT's coverage is perfectly balanced, between promoting Vladimir Putin and ridiculing the West. US CORRESPENDENT: Iran’s nuclear program. US CORRESPONDENT: Iran’s nuclear program. Washington suffers sleepless nights and paranoia when it comes to the nuclear capabilities of countries like Iran. RT CORRESPONDENT: Double standards, galore. BOB GARFIELD: But what exactly is Russia Today? If a journalist criticizing the government is a shock, how much journalism is happening there, in the first place, as opposed to PR? Newsweek’s Matthew Cooper wrote that “When it comes to Ukraine, RT is like going to a Cold War theme park, only without the breadlines.” At the National Journal, Lucia Graves wrote that, according to RT, the crisis in Crimea is an adventure filled with, quote, “tea, sandwiches and selfies.” BuzzFeed’s list of the most insane moments from RT’s coverage included this accusation of American hypocrisy.
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