Russia Today

Russian state-controlled international television network

Russia Today also known as RT is an English-language channel in Moscow, Russia. It is on all the time and broadcasts from its offices in Moscow. It is used to tell people about urgent news and information. Many people say that the news at RT are not true quite often.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] About 700 million people watch the channel all over the world.

RT
TypeState media,[11][12]
news channel,
propaganda[13]
CountryRussia
Broadcast areaWorldwide
HeadquartersMoscow
Programming
Language(s)News channel:
English, French, Arabic & Spanish
Documentary channel:
English, French, Russian
Online platforms:
German[14]
Picture format1080i (HDTV)
(downscaled to 16:9 480i/576i for the SDTV feed)
Ownership
OwnerANO "TV-Novosti"[15]
Sister channels
History
Launched10 December 2005; 18 years ago (2005-12-10) (registered on 6 April 2005)[19]
Former namesRussia Today (2005–2009)
Links
Websitewww.rt.com
Availability

Sources

change
  1. Nassetta, Jack; Gross, Kimberly (30 October 2020). "State media warning labels can counteract the effects of foreign misinformation". Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. Harvard University: Harvard Kennedy School. doi:10.37016/mr-2020-45. Retrieved 19 March 2022. However, when it comes to disinformation from state-controlled media sources platforms' options are more limited. Most often channels like Russia's RT and Iran's PressTV do not technically violate a platform's terms of service and so cannot be removed. However, they still play a vital role in the disinformation ecosystem. Not only do they put out disinformation through their websites and social media channels, they are key nodes in coordinated campaigns, as well. For instance, the content originally posted on RT will be reposted down a chain of websites until it appears to be an organic article on an American outlet (Nimmo, 2017).
  2. Golovchenko, Yevgeniy (11 December 2020). "Measuring the scope of pro-Kremlin disinformation on Twitter". Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. 7 (1). Springer Nature: 1–11. doi:10.1057/s41599-020-00659-9. ISSN 2662-9992. The impact of Russian state-controlled news outlets—which are frequent sources of pro-Kremlin disinformation—is concentrated in one, highly popular news outlet, RT. [...] When it comes to overt reach, the Russian government openly funds English-speaking outlets, such as Sputnik News and RT. These outlets serve as a frequent source of pro-Kremlin disinformation both according to scholars, fact-checkers and Western authorities (BBC, 2019; Elliot, 2019; Thornton, 2015).
  3. Walker, Christopher (2016). "The Hijacking of "Soft Power"" (PDF). Journal of Democracy. 27 (1). Johns Hopkins University Press: 49–63. doi:10.1353/jod.2016.0007. S2CID 31802016. Retrieved 19 March 2022 – via National Endowment for Democracy. State or state-friendly media in Russia—Life News, NTV, Channel One Russia, and Russia 24—disseminate not just the Kremlin's narratives but also outright fakery to domestic audiences and those in the Russian-speaking space. These outlets spread the same stories via social media as well. RT, meanwhile, pushes this manipulated content out to international audiences.
  4. Fletcher, Richard; Cornia, Alessio; Graves, Lucas; Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis (1 January 2018). "Measuring the reach of "fake news" and online disinformation in Europe" (PDF). Australasian Policing. 10 (2). Retrieved 19 March 2022 – via Mediterraneo Cronaca. For comparative purposes, we also included two prominent Russian news sites which have featured in European policy discussions around disinformation, namely Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik. These Russian state-backed organisations are clearly different from sites that engage in for-profit fabrication of false news, but both independent fact-checkers and the EU's European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force have identified multiple instances where these sites have published disinformation.
  5. Borges, Priscila Monteiro; Gambarato, Renira Rampazzo (29 January 2019). "The Role of Beliefs and Behavior on Facebook: A Semiotic Approach to Algorithms, Fake News, and Transmedia Journalism". International Journal of Communication. 13. USC Annenberg Press: 603–618. ISSN 1932-8036. Retrieved 19 March 2022. Notorious examples of fake news masquerading as news can be found in reports broadcast on the U.S. cable news channel Fox News (Schram & Fording, 2018) and the Russian international television network RT (Russia Today; Dowling, 2017). Thus, there are also a number of fake news reports published by traditional media outlets (White, 2017), generating a consequent increase in distrust for traditional journalism (Siddique, 2018).
  6. LoGiurato, Brett (30 April 2014). "Russia's Propaganda Channel Just Got A Journalism Lesson From The US State Department". Business Insider. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  7. Crowley, Michael (1 May 2014). "Tit-for-Tat: Putin's Maddening Propaganda Trick". Time. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  8. Yablokov, Ilya (November 2015). "Conspiracy Theories as a Russian Public Diplomacy Tool: The Case of Russia Today (RT)" (PDF). Politics. 35 (3–4). SAGE: 301–315. doi:10.1111/1467-9256.12097. S2CID 142728966. Retrieved 19 March 2022 – via University of Montenegro. Among the conspiratorial ideas that feature in RT's broadcasts, two types are of particular interest: the first includes genuinely American conspiracy theories; and the second includes ideas of conspiracy in relations between the US and Russia. The analysis of these two types of conspiracy theories offers an opportunity to explore how they are employed to undermine US domestic and foreign policies.
  9. Elswah, Mona; Howard, Philip N (1 October 2020). ""Anything that Causes Chaos": The Organizational Behavior of Russia Today (RT)". Journal of Communication. 70 (5). Oxford University Press: 623–645. doi:10.1093/joc/jqaa027. Retrieved 19 March 2022. Across our interviews, our respondents agreed that the goals of the channel since 2008 have been and still are as follows. First, to push the idea that Western countries have as many problems as Russia. Second, to encourage conspiracy theories about media institutions in the West in order to discredit and delegitimize them. This is clearly adherent to the channel's "Questions More" slogan. Third, to create controversy and to make people criticize the channel, because it suggests that the channel is important, an approach that would particularly help RT managers get more funding from the government.
  10. Gray, Rosie (13 March 2014). "How The Truth Is Made At Russia Today". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  11. Haigh, Maria; Haigh, Thomas; Kozak, Nadine I. (26 October 2018). "Stopping Fake News". Journalism Studies. 19 (14). Routledge: 2062–2087. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2017.1316681. ISSN 1461-670X. S2CID 152142122. Retrieved 1 March 2022 – via Taylor & Francis.
  12. Golovchenko, Yevgeniy; Hartmann, Mareike; Adler-Nissen, Rebecca (1 September 2018). "State, media and civil society in the information warfare over Ukraine: citizen curators of digital disinformation". International Affairs. 94 (5). Oxford University Press: 975–994. doi:10.1093/ia/iiy148. ISSN 0020-5850. Retrieved 20 March 2021. Particularly in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine that erupted in 2013–2014, the Kremlin has been accused of orchestrating disinformation campaigns against the Ukrainian government and western countries by using online trolls and state-controlled online outlets such as RT (formerly known as Russia Today), Sputnik and Life News.
  13. Langdon, Kate C.; Tismaneanu, Vladimir (9 July 2019). "Russian Foreign Policy: Freedom for Whom, to Do What?". Putin's Totalitarian Democracy: Ideology, Myth, and Violence in the Twenty-First Century. Springer International. pp. 189–224. ISBN 978-3-030-20579-9. Retrieved 21 March 2021 – via Google Books. Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev documented the typical newsroom antics in one of Russia's largest propaganda outlets, RT News (formerly known as Russia Today). When his acquaintance composed a piece that referenced the Soviet Union's occupation of Estonia in 1945, the writer was chewed out by his boss, who maintained the belief that Russians saved Estonia. Any other descriptions of the events of 1945 were unacceptable assaults on Russia's integrity, apparently, so the boss demanded that he amend his text.
  14. "About RT (formerly corporate profile)". RT International. Retrieved 14 April 2017.
  15. "Contact info". RT International. Retrieved 14 April 2017.
  16. Sloss, David L. (12 April 2022). Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1-5036-3115-1. Retrieved 3 March 2022 – via Google Books. Ruptly, a subsidiary of RT that specializes in video, has 230,000 likes on Facebook, 52,000 Twitter followers, and 304,000 YouTube subscribers in the UK.
  17. Moore, Matthew (10 February 2018). "Company behind Grenfell YouTube film has links to Kremlin". The Times. Retrieved 25 January 2021.
  18. O'Sullivan, Donie; Griffin, Drew; Devine, Curt; Shubert, Atika (February 18, 2019). "Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials". CNN. Retrieved July 30, 2020.
  19. File:ANO TV-Novosti (Federal Tax Service of Russia, Unified State Register of Legal Entities).pdf