RT: ‘Enemy’ Broadcasts?

Three months ago, Russia’s RT channel marked its 20^th anniversary with a lavish party at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. When Russia Today went on the air in 2005, it had a day-long lineup of attractive women offering a quirky mix of advice to tourists visiting Moscow, sarcastic editorials about America’s endless wars in the Middle East, and more-than-halfway decent documentary segments about the Stalin years and the Second World War. Since then, RT has come of age, becoming a sizable international operation in multiple languages with a special emphasis on reaching developing countries. If you’re in India, Brazil, or South Africa, your hotel TV probably has RT.

With a worldwide audience, RT rivals the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, along with other official mouthpieces for their respective permanent governments, as well as the West’s independent-but-establishment broadcasters — CNN, Sky News, and the three big US networks. There was even a time when RT was on cable systems in America (it’s still available on free streaming). Is RT just propaganda, merely the Russian point of view, or both? Is there necessarily a difference? What about our own media? The question must be asked: How different are we? Has your own opinion of the answer changed over the years?

Broadcasting a nation’s view of the world really started with the BBC a century ago. Mussolini and Hitler were not slow to realize how persuasive worldwide radio could be, nor were the Soviets. The Nazi news agency was called “Transocean” and had transmitters aimed at North and South America. After the war, the USSR’s prime overseas station was Moskva Gavrit, “Moscow speaks.” We called it Radio Moscow.

When I was nine, I got a build-it-yourself, minimal three-tube shortwave radio kit for Christmas, the Lafayette Explor-Air. The following spring, 1962, I wrote a letter to Moscow Mailbag, receiving a postcard in return a few weeks later that told me when to tune in to hear the letter read on the air. I did! For a ten-year-old kid, it was a thrill hearing that static-y, wavering sound across thousands of miles. It made me slightly notorious locally for a few weeks. I got skeptical mail. Did I really exist? (Yes.) Was I a member of the Communist Party? No, I answered truthfully, I’m just a kid with a radio. Anyone could listen, but in a country where it was free to do so, few people bothered.

Shortwave radio was the web browsing of its day, crossing borders and challenging national authorities. In the fall of ’62, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I heard writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko speaking in English from Havana. “America, have you no shame?” he thundered. (When I met Yevtushenko, 23 years later, I brought it up. He was righteously defensive but sheepish.)

Naturally, we were no slouches, broadcast-wise either. Voice of America was our official radio, but we also had the semi-official Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which had a harder political line than VOA could openly take. When the Cold War ended, the international broadcasters lost much of their relevance.

Today, instead of the wavering, static-y radio signal, it’s done via streaming video, with images that are so crystal clear it’s like looking through a window at the world.

By the start of the Obama years, RT was a widely available free channel on US and European cable systems. The Cold War seemed truly behind us, and RT geared up to be the broadcast host to the world for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. As in the rest of the world, the summer games are a bigger deal in national prestige, but Russia, like Canada and Scandinavia, takes special proprietary pride in the games of the frozen north. Despite the usual construction headaches and a frantic rush to finish preparations, the Sochi games began without major incident, playing the usual Olympic role of using the Opening Ceremony to tell a nation’s story in the grandest of world arenas.

But the Sochi games weren’t February 2014’s biggest news story. Kiev’s Maidan Revolution spoiled Russia’s Olympic good vibes. Now it was Russia’s turn to react, and they rapidly took control of Crimea. US-Russian relations plunged. These events of 2014 transformed RT’s outward-facing role, making it much more confrontational, even less one-of-the-gang in news coverage. Editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan has led the channel since its inception, and the past dozen years have, shall we say, given her plenty of material to work with.

So what’s it like to watch RT? First, give them this: the presentation is as slick as any Western news channel, with first-rate video and computer graphics. Everything looks up to date and social media savvy. There’s no musty air of old-timey Radio Moscow about it. Like most 24-hour news channels, there’s news at the top of most hours, followed by a half hour of either documentaries or regular weekly series, including Crosstalk with Peter Lavalle, Sanchez Effect, Other Worlds with Oksana Boyko, Going Underground, and an eccentric Sunday week in review, Moscow Mules, hosted by an irascible Scotsman. The website includes documentaries, archived shows, and off-air essays.

That’s the basic format. What about the content?

Consider Canadian writer Rachel Marsden, an outspoken skeptic of Europe, America, and Israel, and a frequent RT contributor. She has a left-ish air and sometimes seems to hate everything the developed world does, but unlike western progressives she’s not exactly woke about identity politics and gender. In this, she follows the line of her Russian on-air hosts. You won’t hear any defense of affirmative action or Drag Queen Storytime. RT editors keep up with hot-button US issues rather shrewdly.

This is one of the interesting adaptations RT has made in recent years, a real cultural shift. For a long time, their criticisms of the US, though no longer Marxist, were still, broadly speaking, from the Left. However, that’s shifted somewhat in the Trump years. Russian media has picked up the maverick tone of Russell Brand, Jordan Petersen and their new semi-friend and (in their view) Trump whisperer Tucker Carlson. Many RT commentators make favorable references to Charlie Kirk. It’s not without calculation, but it’s not 100% insincere either. They dislike some aspects of global culture that Kirk as well and are seeing opportunities to make common cause with Trump-style US populism.

Most of RT’s news readers and personalities are a mix of nationalities, but American Rick Sanchez heads up a US-style discussion that at least superficially would fit in at Fox or Newsmax. RT regards Sanchez Effect, which airs Monday through Thursday, as its flagship program. Sanchez, a skilled if bombastic interviewer, is a social conservative, which he says was one reason he was willing to move his family to Moscow. RT has regular segments on US families who are alleged refugees from Big Rainbow.

Part of the backdrop of Sanchez Effect is his Tucker-like positive reaction to the Russian capital’s admittedly showy infrastructure improvements. It’s legitimate if one-sided information about the like-it-or-not resilience of Russia’s wartime economy, and some Americans (though fewer than Tucker thought) don’t realize that it’s not still poverty-stricken 1950 in Russia anymore. Rick’s not able to give us the total picture of how all this gets done and paid for, but as @GPentelie and I noted elsewhere, those new streets, buildings and parks sure aren’t just CGI, nor are they just in Moscow.

On RT, I’ve seen segments about smaller cities with the visual background of bus shelters that have cell chargers, info screens and video that we’d envy in Los Angeles, partly because, unlike L.A., there’s an expectation now in Russia that they won’t be instantly scavenged or trashed as they would have been in the Yeltsin years. Public order has always been a big deal in Russia, which is why Putin, even when given relatively honest coverage, doesn’t come across to Russians as Stalin Mark II but as someone more comparable, in our terms, to 2001-era Rudy Giuliani, but with the nearly limitless power of a nation in a hurry. It’s a scary combo. He means it to be.

Each December, Vladimir Putin does a series of public events, the biggest being a four-hour-plus marathon press conference, an impressive live performance in a heavily curated, but still remarkable national “Ask Me Anything.” Many questions were practical: Why is my pension check always late? Will anyone do something about reckless e-bike riders? Putin had the answers at his fingertips, like a Kremlin version of Quiz Show. But several questioners were bold enough to ask more deeply about challenges ahead for Russia in the new year, including the war. The press conference’s final question came from someone I was once privileged to know, someone to whom we’d given an Andrzej Wajda prize in 2003 for artistic courage.

Here’s a summary: “Renowned Russian film director Alexander Sokurov publicly criticized President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government's repressive policies, censorship, and lack of open dialogue at a Human Rights Council meeting, warning of a national 'dead end' and leading to a rare confrontation where Putin defended his actions but pledged to investigate some issues. Sokurov's criticisms focused on the stifling atmosphere for youth, the banning of films, and the costly 'foreign agent' laws, prompting Putin to caution against disrespecting allies and territorial integrity, though Sokurov's comments highlight deep societal divisions."

Now that takes guts. Notice, though, what’s different: Sokurov has been against the war in Ukraine since 2022, but is tolerated as a sincere patriot, if through somewhat gritted teeth, possibly because Putin has known him a long time (they are both from Saint Petersburg). He hasn’t been whisked away to an arctic jail or the gold mines at Kolyma. RT could have cut Sokurov’s video feed — and in Soviet days, they surely would have. This post doesn’t claim that Russian state media is as free as ours; my point is that sometimes there’s more useful information in theirs than I expected, and also, regrettably, sometimes the information in our media isn’t as independent and free as we thought.

Don’t be afraid of foreign media. Be aware of manipulation in all media.