Disinformation: ‘Pravda’ May Be Gone, but Now There’s ‘Russia Today’ [View all]

[uhnope]

A really good read http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/90971/disinformation

Anyone who has watched Russia’s English-language propaganda channel RT over the past 10 months would have learned that in Syria, foreign-funded terrorists, Israeli operatives, and American intelligence agents are attempting to destabilize a benevolent, popular autocrat. Take, for example, the ongoing siege of Homs, in which more than 400 people have been slaughtered by Bashar al-Assad’s regime over the past week and a half. Rockets and mortar have rained down on apartment buildings, and, according to a report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, entire families have been executed inside their homes. Here’s how RT summed up news of the massacre: “Disinformation makes it difficult to establish Homs reality.”

While it’s unsurprising that the network’s coverage of the Syrian uprising would track closely with positions staked out by the Kremlin—for example, when Russia vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the regime, an RT correspondent stressed that the resolution “could have sent an unbalanced signal to all sides of the conflict”—RT hasn’t simply promoted an anti-interventionist or anti-NATO viewpoint. Instead, it has frequently parroted Assad’s narrative by providing a platform for paranoiacs and conspiracy theorists to dispute that civilians are being killed by the regime, accuse America and Israel of being behind the deaths of Syrian civilians, and argue that the government in Damascus is a beacon of tolerance in the region.

It’s tempting to dismiss the channel as a well-funded playground for unsophisticated cranks and Vladimir Posner impersonators. But RT, previously known as Russia Today, has become an online media phenomenon. Its YouTube videos have been viewed 675 million times, and the network claims that its television signal reaches “over 430 million people, or 22 percent of all cable subscribers worldwide.” (By comparison, CNN and CNN International have a combined 32 million video views on YouTube.) In 2010 RT was nominated for an International Emmy for its coverage of Barack Obama’s state visit to Russia.

The channel’s large and fervent online fan club sees the network as a brilliantly subversive corrective to America’s corporate media. Indeed, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, that scourge of government secrecy and authoritarianism, recently announced that he would host an interview show on RT, apparently unbothered by the secrecy and authoritarianism of the channel’s patron in Moscow: the Kremlin.