Operating a fake news channel to promote state propaganda comes with considerable intrinsic problems and contradictions. Propaganda and news reporting have contrary purposes that propagandists carefully work to obscure by various means. That’s the art of propaganda: blurring the line between reality and BS, creating false equivalencies between the two, and implicitly arguing that the […]
Ryan Dawson uses the internet to promote bigotry and Holocaust denial, but on RT, he’s a “geopolitical analyst”, “human rights activist” and “Asian affairs expert.” In 2007, a man named Eric Hunt cornered Elie Wiesel in the elevator of San Francisco’s Argent Hotel, grabbed him and pulled him off the elevator into a hallway. Hunt […]
Sometimes in the course of reporting on a story, a journalist makes an error in judgment, accidentally walks into a trip wire and sets off a signal flare (so to speak) alerting viewers that his version of events is unreliable. In his reporting on the Ukraine crisis, RT’s Graham Phillips has done just that: literally […]
RT may bill itself as a news channel, but it stretches the definition of that term in several readily apparent ways. It blurs the line between entertainment, advertising and news, with many producers and on-air personalities coming from backgrounds in advertising or entertainment rather than journalism. It tends to portray the US and EU in […]
False equivalency between the US and Russia was a gateway drug for RT host Abby Martin. She’s now moved on to the hard stuff: North Korea. On her April 22 program, in a segment entitled “A Visitor’s Guide to North Korea,” Martin interviewed Marcel Cartier, an RT employee whom she introduced as a hip hop […]
Reporters love nothing more than a source with important inside information about the secret operations of a powerful institution. For the public, the word “whistleblower” evokes the individual citizen putting themselves at risk to stop wrongdoing by an employer. It’s a powerful idea – one justifiably lauded both in fiction and fact, and protected and […]
Conspiracy theorists have an unfortunate tendency to blame those killed in mass-murders for the attacks that killed them. Nothing about the 9/11 “Truth” movement is more disturbing than when it either says outright or just implies that the victims somehow deserved to die. Disgracefully, Max Keiser, whom RT provides a daily forum, does just this. […]
“During the decade that has passed (since 9/11), numerous 9/11 Truth organizations have formed. There are Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, Remember Building 7.org, and a New York group which includes 9/11 families. These groups call for a real investigation. David Ray […]
Today we’re launching a new column, “Watching Russia,” focusing on Russian television propaganda and distortion, especially as pushed through the English-language news outlets like RT (formerly Russia Today) and Voice of Russia. Manuel Ochsenreiter is not a household name either in the United States or in his native Germany. He’s the editor of “Zuerst! German News Magazine” […]
