Vienna, October 26 – On October 26, 2014, Ukrainians voted in the early parliamentary elections. Ukraine currently has a mixed electoral system (50% elected from party lists and 50% elected from constituencies or single-member districts) with a 5% election threshold. Here are the results of the National Exit Poll 2014 (I mention only those parties […]
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 […]
UPDATED: RT, also known as Russia Today (that’s not entirely accurate anymore, but it’s a long story), is the English-language Russian media Goliath which has a lot to boast about. A 2012 Pew Research poll found that RT had the most Youtube videos of any news agency on the planet. The Kremlin-operated agency is now […]
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 […]
Two days ago, the discussion on social networks was about how people on the EU sanctions list could nevertheless travel to France and even give press conferences in Paris. The fourth most powerful official in Russia, the Speaker of the Russian State Duma, Sergei Naryshkin, did just that. He found himself on the EU sanctions […]
John Wilson, a Scottish writer, is the author of The City of the Plague, a scary story from the 17th century which takes place in London. In Russian school, we don’t study Wilson, but we read Alexander Pushkin. Among Pushkin’s Little Tragedies, there is one called A Feast in the Time of the Plague, a […]
