How Russia’s RT went from a cable news clone to covert operator

When Olga Belogolova moved to Washington, DC, in 2010, Russian state-owned broadcaster RT was making a big push in the U.S.

“I remember going to bars in this town and seeing RT on televisions, just on,” Belogolova, who is now director of the Emerging Technologies Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, recalls.

RT was long known to be government-funded and a source of Russian propaganda. But it claimed to be independent. It hired American journalists, and featured some big names like former CNN host Larry King. The channel’s aesthetic was sleek, modern, and cable news-like. But over the years, as American relations with Russia cooled, skepticism of RT grew.

Now, the U.S. government has accused RT and its parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, of going beyond propaganda, as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to destabilize democracies and erode international support for Ukraine.

“They are engaged in covert influence activities aimed at undermining American elections and democracies, functioning like a de facto arm of Russia's intelligence apparatus,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a press conference this month.

That includes a scheme to funnel nearly $10 million to pro-Trump American influencers, over which the Justice Department recently indicted two RT employees.

Responding to Blinken’s accusation, an RT statement joked that the organization has been “broadcasting straight out of the KGB headquarters all this time.”

From the war in Georgia to Occupy Wall Street

RT originally launched in 2005 as Russia Today, a round-the-clock English language news channel.

It had a clear mission: to “reflect the Russian position on the main issues of international politics and inform the wider public about the events and phenomena of Russian life,” according to Nina Jankowicz, who has studied Russian information operations and also co-founded the American Sunlight Project.

The channel’s first big moment came in 2008 during Russia’s war in Georgia. Russia Today presented itself as a counterpoint to coverage on CNN and other international outlets that its editor-in-chief said was biased towards the Georgians.

In the following years, the network shortened its name to RT, launched channels in Arabic and Spanish, and began broadcasting from Washington, DC, under the name RT America. It also built a big online presence on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and its own website.

As RT evolved, one constant was its approach as a provocative alternative to Western media, in a “just asking questions” mode seemingly aimed at younger, left-leaning Americans.

It adopted the slogan “Question More” and in 2010 launched a controversial advertising campaign with the phrase. One ad asked whether then President Barack Obama or Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad posed “the greater nuclear threat?”

That contrarian approach got RT noticed, including for its coverage of the anti-wealth inequality Occupy Wall Street movement of the early 2010s.

But RT’s legitimate reporting was mixed with sensationalism, seizing on stories of grievance and chaos in the U.S. “They also engage in ragebait…in disaster footage and kind of the shock and awe value,” Jankowicz said. Russia has long deflected scrutiny of issues like its own human rights violations by highlighting the U.S.’s own social problems.

RT has also trafficked in outright conspiracism, from the false claim that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US to bogus theories about the September 11th attacks.

Scrutiny increases as views of Russia soured

Jankowicz says RT’s image began to shift when Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. American RT anchor Liz Wahl quit on air, saying “I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin.”

“The masks were off. It was clear that RT was just shilling for the Russian point of view,” Jankowicz said.

Scrutiny of Russian state media escalated with the revelations that the Kremlin sought to tip the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. U.S. intelligence officials accused RT of being involved in election meddling, and RT America was forced to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent.

In January 2019, Facebook took down hundreds of pages posing as independent European news sites that were actually run by employees of an RT sister brand called Sputnik.

A month later, CNN reported that Maffick Media, which made online videos targeting left-leaning millennials, was funded by an RT subsidiary – without any disclosure.

The fake news sites in particular were a precursor to what RT is accused of doing today, said Belogolova, who was leading Facebook’s Russia investigations at the time. “It's not a totally novel thing for them to sort of blur the lines between covert and overt,” she said.

After the invasion of Ukraine, RT adopts ‘guerrilla’ tactics

Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Many US cable companies dropped RT America, and the U.S. channel shut down. RT was banned across much of Europe, and was blocked globally on YouTube, where it had racked up billions of views.

So, the network looked for ways to keep pushing pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine messages — without the RT label.

Speaking on Russian state television after this month’s Justice Department indictments, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said RT started working “underground” using “guerilla operations” in places it lost access, including the U.S.

Simonyan wouldn't say whether the scheme involving several prominent right-wing American influencers is one of these operations. The influencers, who have not been charged, say they didn’t know the money came from Russia.

RT has mocked the US government’s allegations. Speaking on Russian TV, Simonyan sarcastically told any listening U.S. officials: “Write down for yourself that all RT employees and, personally, the editor-in-chief obey only orders from the Kremlin. All other orders immediately become toilet paper!”

RT’s worldwide footprint

The State Department says RT is running these kinds of covert operations around the world, from secretly operating media outlets in Africa and Germany to targeting elections in Moldova.

US officials allege the Kremlin has even embedded a cyberintelligence unit inside RT.

“RT has become a clearinghouse for a set of covert operations, covert influence activities, intelligence operations de facto, in country after country after country,” said James Rubin, head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which focuses on foreign disinformation and propaganda.

Following the State Department’s announcement, Meta and TikTok banned RT and its affiliates from their apps.

But the network still has a big footprint across Latin America and Africa, where critics say it broadcasts a steady stream of anti-Ukraine, anti-imperialist, anti-Western content.

“One of the reasons why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be, given that Russia has invaded Ukraine and violated rule number one of the international system, is because of the broad scope and reach of RT, where propaganda, disinformation, and lies are spread to millions, if not billions, of people around the world,” Rubin said.

Belogolova says transparency about what RT is up to is good — and that it’s important for people to know where their information is coming from.

But she also warns against overstating the impact of these influence operations.

“We're very capable here in the United States and in other countries of coming up with our own very stupid ideas and conspiracy theories,” she said. “And sometimes we don't need the help of the Russians to do that.”

Copyright 2024, NPR

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