RT parroted Kremlin officials’ claims that Putin had no intention of invading Ukraine and, once the invasion began, refused to cover Russian atrocities.
Moscow had no intention of invading Ukraine, and reports to the contrary were part of a fake reality that the West was trying to sell to the world.
Western media outlets worked in lockstep with their respective governments to pump out a stream of one-sided anti-Russian lies, all part of a “coordinated campaign” designed to gaslight people. It was just like in the movie Wag the Dog. The biggest victim of this conspiracy: Ukraine itself, which was suffering because the U.S. had drawn it into its games to further America’s selfish interests. It was nothing less than “total madness.”
“We don’t want to live in a kingdom of crooked mirrors. We won’t put up these endless lies.”
That was the message in mid-February from Maria Zakharova, the head press agent for Russia’s Foreign Ministry. Zakharova’s blatant falsities were dutifully reported by the media outlet RT, which had obtained an exclusive interview with Russia’s chief propagandist.
RT, previously known as Russia Today, is a state-funded and state-directed Russian network of television channels and websites, which operate around the globe to spread Russian propaganda. On Thursday, CNN reported that RT America, the network’s U.S. branch, was shuttering its operations after DirectTV dropped its channel and Roku pulled it from its television streaming platforms. The fall of RT America comes after Germany and the rest of the European Union banned RT, Australia suspended the channel, Canadian cable operators dropped it, and Britain considers pulling its broadcast license after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The RT website in the U.S. appeared to be down most of Thursday but was live again Friday morning, and its social media channels continue to pump out and promote stories.
Sputnik, another Russian propaganda outlet, still operates in the U.S. but with a smaller reach than RT. Both RT and Sputnik disguise themselves as conventional, publicly funded media outlets like the BBC and Voice of America, but they lack those outlets’ transparency and journalistic independence, according to a January report from the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center. “RT and Sputnik serve primarily as conduits for the Kremlin’s talking points,” the report said, and Russia uses them to “inject pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda into the information environment.”
In the run-up to its invasion, Russia used RT, Sputnik, and other outlets to push its narrative that the U.S. and the West generally were war-hungry aggressors. According to the Russians, Ukrainian leaders had sabotaged plans for peace, and “Kiev only has itself to blame for its impending destruction.”
Since Russia’s invasion last week, RT and Sputnik have been utilized to pump up the accomplishments of the Russian army and to whitewash its atrocities.
A Kremlin Mouthpiece Designed to Sow Division
Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, National Review viewed over a month’s worth of RT’s news and opinion coverage to better understand its goals and methods.
The review found that Kremlin leaders used RT to spout their lies and half-truths with little evidence of skepticism from RT journalists, who seem to be mostly young and inexperienced reporters, many based in Moscow. Many, if not most, RT stories in the U.S. run without bylines. Headlines and stories often are based off the claim of a single Russian government official — Ukrainian regions ‘dreaming’ of joining Russia – ex-general; Lavrov labels Western ‘Russia invasion’ claims ‘propaganda, fakes and fiction’ — typically with little pushback or global context.
Not everything RT reported was fake news, and it didn’t exclusively report the opinions of Russian leaders. Brent Sadler, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has researched the U.S. competition with China and Russia, noted that it’s hard for propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik to get an audience to buy their disinformation if everything they publish is lies.
“It’s a lot easier to get your audience to digest something if there’s a shred of truth in it,” he said. “How do you kind of get people to think there’s a plausibility in things? Give them a half-truth.”
In addition to pushing Kremlin talking points, RT likes to highlight helpful stories based on the views of divisive American politicos and pundits — Trump praises Putin; Tucker Carlson wonders why US elites hate Putin; Bernie Sanders warns against war with Russia. It also runs stories to make the U.S. seem weak, including a couple of recent stories about American fighter-jet crashes.
“What they’re after is sowing distrust for U.S. institutions, undermining faith in the military, undermining that you have a fair and equal judicial system, enflaming racial tensions,” Sadler said of RT, Sputnik, and other foreign propaganda outlets.
Longer recent feature stories in RT focused on discrediting Ukraine, portraying the country as being overrun with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. One recent feature highlighted Ukraine’s so-called “Nazi heroes.” Another detailed a reporter’s “fact-finding mission” to eastern Ukraine, which highlighted a “Soviet patriot” with “zero tolerance towards the Nazi Ukrainian state.”
This all was mixed in with a heavy dose of U.S. pop-culture and culture-war news, including recent stories about South Park and Futurama, and a review of Disney’s The Book of Boba Fett television series, which warned that “Star Wars is running a real risk of creative bankruptcy.”
RT leaned heavy into the Joe Rogan–Spotify dustup and the Canadian freedom convoy protests. It also publishes a lot of quirky, clickbait stories: Scientists divulge easy way to lose weight; DC hero revealed to be bisexual.
Downplaying Russian Intentions for War
In the weeks leading up to the invasion, RT pushed back hard on the notion that any invasion was imminent, typically with quotes around words like “invasion” or “Russian threat.” Claims by Western leaders that they expected Russia to attack Ukraine were almost always followed by a corrective stating that Russia maintains it has “zero plans to attack its neighbor.”
In early February, for example, RT found it newsworthy that the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company had urged President Joe Biden to “work for peace” and to avoid fanning the flames of war “in response to Russia’s threats.” RT then dutifully declared that, “contrary to what Ben & Jerry’s has said, Moscow hasn’t been making any actual threats towards Ukraine, and has denied all allegations that it’s planning to attack its neighbor as groundless attempts to provoke ‘hysteria.’”
In mid February, after Russia announced, falsely, that it was withdrawing troops from the Ukrainian border, RT repeatedly spiked the football, claiming it was clear there would be no Russian invasion after all. “Western media destroyed their reputation with fake Ukraine news,” read one headline. “Russia will not be asking for formal apologies from the Western news outlets that set various dates for a Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine only to see their predictions proven wrong, Moscow has declared,” the story’s lead read on February 17. An 0p-ed writer, opined that because “the much-touted invasion of Ukraine” had not yet occurred, Western officials had “a lot of egg on their faces.”
After the Russian invasion, RT has continued to toe the Kremlin line, pumping out stories reporting that Vladimir Putin had simply ordered a “special operation” in response to “Ukrainian aggression.” Russia had no plans to take over Ukraine, RT reported, quoting Putin that Moscow was embarking on an effort to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country. Breaking news bars at the top of the RT website the day of the attack declared: Russian civilian ships attacked by Ukraine; Ukrainian troops “abandoning positions,” Russia claims; and Ukraine cuts diplomatic ties with Russia.
In the days after the attack, RT offered no reporting about Ukrainians slowing the Russian advance or Russian struggles with supplies and fuel. RT didn’t show images of charred Russian tanks, or dead or captured Russian soldiers found in most other mainstream outlets. There was little reporting about Russian casualties or Russian attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine.
Truth Over Narrative
If there was one topic that RT was as devoted to over the last month as the Joe Rogan controversy and denying Russia’s intent to invade Ukraine, it was its own standing in Europe and the U.S. The outlet repeatedly ran stories and op-eds about RT being “targeted in the West,” arguing that banning RT propaganda was an assault on free speech.
RT’s slogans are “Freedom over censorship, truth over narrative,” and “Question more.”
In an early February op-ed, a communist “cultural philosopher” opined that “RT is targeted for being a platform, where certain topics that the West would have preferred to keep marginalized receive coverage.”
In another piece published in late January, Paul Robinson, a professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Ottawa, pushed back on the State Department report that identified RT and Sputnik as propaganda, calling it “typical of the West’s burgeoning disinformation industry.” Robinson offered a both-sides argument, alleging that Washington “information warriors” are “just as biased as those they criticize.” Their argument that RT suffers from a lack of objectivity “reflects the authors’ apparent belief first that there is an objective truth, second that they are its guardians, and third that Russia is trying to undermine it,” Robinson wrote.
Robinson terminated his Russia-centric blog the day of the Russia invasion.
Sadler said that the role of RT’s stable of opinion writers — which included college professors, former members of the Russian and U.S. militaries, a conservative Canadian columnist, and others — was to provide RT with an air of authority, believability, and respectability.
“I don’t doubt any of the foreign correspondents’ or contributors’ belief or commitment to what they’re saying. It’s not that they’re just hired guns,” Sadler said. “In many cases, they believe what they’re saying, and they find faults in the West or in their home government, so they’re more than happy to criticize. RT gives them a platform where nowhere else would.”
The dissolution of RT America is a blow to Russia’s disinformation campaign in the U.S., but it won’t end the effort. The network, launched in 2005, had limited reach on U.S. cable packages, but it still reports millions of social-media followers: 3 million Twitter followers, 4.68 million YouTube subscribers, and 7 million Facebook followers. Those accounts are still publishing stories with active links. Sputnik has a smaller social-media audience: 1.4 million Facebook followers, about 350,000 Twitter followers, and 325,000 YouTube subscribers. Sadler said those numbers likely are inflated, noting that the Russians are good at creating fake followers — bots — to give the impression that they’re more influential than they actually are, and to “create false spin.”
RT’s Spanish and Arabic websites also are still live. Last month, RT announced that it was hiring for a planned new African outlet.
Sadler said he doesn’t think Russia’s propaganda efforts, including RT and Sputnik, have been very effective in the U.S. “At least it hasn’t been yet,” he said, noting that the Russian trolls who targeted the 2016 election have been found to have had a very limited impact.
By comparison, he said, Chinese propaganda efforts in the U.S. are bigger, better funded, and more sophisticated. That’s his bigger concern.
“You don’t even know you’re digesting propaganda,” Sadler said, “and then you start spitting it out and you don’t even realize you’ve become a Chinese robot.”