RT management insists that it provides a much-needed alternative viewpoint to narrow-minded Western journalism, but critics dismiss the channel as an obvious Kremlin propaganda machine. Aside from pieces that broadcast blatant lies about the Russian opposition, particularly United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov, the station’s website includes such features as the “Russian Women Guide,” which disturbingly fetishizes the trend of American men searching out Russian wives on the internet. In a section entitled “Feminism, Russian-style,” an RT commentator writes: “Russian women somehow achieved, without the angst and anger of the western women’s man-eating philosophy, a sense of freedom, independence and, I dare say, happiness that their bra-burning sisters sacrificed a long time ago on the great battlefield of the sexes.” This twisted piece of analysis whitewashes the reality of sexism in Russia, where, as a recent feature by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty pointed out, there is “domestic violence that’s so pervasive many see it as a normal part of everyday life, in a country where an old saying advises, ‘If he beats you, he loves you,'” and where at least 14,000 women die every year from domestic abuse.

A piece out this week by the Independent reveals much about the inner workings of this questionable enterprise:

Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a well-respected US organisation that tracks hate groups and extremists in the United States, published a report about Russia Today. The group did not label the channel itself extremist, but said it gives undue airtime to conspiracy theorists and extremists. “Its slickly packaged stories suggest that a legitimate debate is under way in the United States about who perpetrated the 11 September terrorist attacks, for instance, and about President Obama’s eligibility for high office.”

The top brass at the channel, including editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, have denied this. “We don’t talk about 9/11 any more than US media discusses who was behind the 1999 explosions in Moscow,” she told the authors of the SPLC report, referring to the apartment block bombings that were a catalyst for the second Chechen war. “Moreover, our own journalists have never claimed or even as much as hinted that the US government may have been behind the tragedy of 9/11.”

This is not strictly true, as the report’s authors point out; not only do captions such as “New Yorkers Continue to Fight for 9/11 Truth” appear on screen during stories about the attacks, but on the last anniversary, the channel’s website published a four-part series entitled, “911 Reasons why 9/11 was (probably) an inside job”. A video of a recent interview with a “9/11 Truther” on Youtube is entitled, “Two planes didn’t take twin towers down”.

…

One employee of the channel told The Independent, on condition of anonymity: “I have mixed feelings about whether the channel is actually trying to provoke dissent among Americans. That seems the only logical reason to have some of these guests on and to spend so much time talking about these topics.

And if it’s not for provocation, it’s simply for the money – not that those two things are mutually exclusive:

On the other hand, Denis Trunov [the head of RT America] has said multiple times that his only goal is to get YouTube hits and he will have anyone on who will get Youtube hits. He has even suggested having porn stars on to talk about topics like Afghanistan, in the hope of getting hits.”

The strategy is apparently working.

“We now have more than 150 million views on YouTube, which is much higher than that of Fox News, CNN, Sky News or Reuters YouTube channels,” says Ms Simonyan. “Just a couple of days ago, RT made it into YouTube’s All-Time Top 100 Most Viewed Partners list, replacing President Obama’s channel.”

The article goes on to detail the outright censorship and bias handed down to staff by RT management – a charge readers may particularly remember following the station’s coverage of the 2008 South Ossetia War.

Several journalists at the channel have told The Independent that while some coverage of problems in Russia and sensitive issues is allowed, any direct criticism or questioning of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev is strictly prohibited.

With the start of RT America, observers have started to question the coverage of topics other than Russia. Some of the more bizarre moments on RT can sometimes be put down to youthful inexperience (such as the newsreader who clearly skimread the autocue too fast and referred to “North Korean leader King John the Second”), but sometimes it seems something more sinister is at play. One anchor told The Independent that during an interview with a leading scientist working on Aids he was repeatedly pressured by producers to “ask difficult questions” about the “evidence” that HIV doesn’t cause Aids at all.

The article can be read in its entirety by clicking here.

In the days following Monday’s deadly suicide attacks on the Moscow metro, Russian television has come under mounting criticism for largely ignoring the incidents during the first critical hours after they occurred. As opposed to radio and print media, which are overall less subject to censorship, state-controlled television remains the primary source of news for most Russians.

While Russian television has been routinely criticized for refusing to air prominent oppositionists, anti-government protests, reports containing scenes of graphic violence, and other events that could cast the government in an unfavorable light, the public response to its failure to cover Moscow’s worst terrorist attacks in six years has been uncharacteristically harsh.

In a column for the online newspaper Gazeta.ru, Natalia Gevorkyan argues that today’s Russian television has gone beyond the breaking point and become an alternative reality that only its producers seem to believe in.

A Crooked Broadcast
By Natalia Gevorkyan
March 31, 2010
Gazeta.ru

Russian television has definitely ceased to be a form of news media. Its design of a virtual form of reality has reached the peak of perfection. TV has its own reality – with little jokes, idiotic talk shows that take one week to write, and programming that is in no way affected by reality. But in this country there is grief, the dead, the wounded, and shattered metro cars in the center of the capital. The result: on the day of the terrorist attacks, it was only the published news media that lay out the real reality, and not all at once. The remaining programs left the impression of a broadcast from Mars. They did not concern this life, or these deaths. (I’m not talking here about Russia Today. The television broadcasts for foreigners turned out to be more adequately realistic. This channel is in a different competitive milieu, the western one – normal, sensible, professional. They have to correspond.)

I was abroad when the events in Beslan began. Except for the breaks for headline news, which also began with Beslan, CNN showed only Beslan. RTR-Planeta at the time was telling me about prostitution. Now I’m in Moscow. The explosions occurred a kilometer away from my home. Or the explosions in Kizlyar, where another twelve of my fellow citizens were killed. Today. I turn on the television. Literally right now, Wednesday mid-day. Movie, movie, movie, drama, drama, drama, talk show about photography, talk show about court, something about Pasternak, songs, laughter. And only in the news breaks do you understand that people still haven’t been buried, people are still carrying flowers, still lighting candles, people are still crying, the prime minister is reanimating ten-year-old jargon, the Federation Council is apparently planning to institute the death penalty.

When cell phones stopped working on Monday, when cars with sirens sped off down Komsomolsky Prospekt and crowds of people moved towards them – if my arm had reached for the television switch, it would only have been as a last resort. The computer. The internet works. Everything is there. That’s all understood.

Then the radio. A more democratically accessible form of media. A separate thank you to radio hosts for their work on this black Monday. They did what television should have done. Right on time, the radio broadcast experts, opinions, and conversations, which are always better than silence and uncertainty. Even if they’re just empty responses to the primary questions: who, how, why? But the analysts, comparisons with analogous terrorist attacks, broadcasting information as it became available, interviews with news people – all of this is absolutely normal journalistic work. The radio flexibly reworked itself during the tragic events. It worked in person, live, broadcasting directly. A few radio stations even cut out their commercials.

The television managers couldn’t decide to do a live broadcast even in a situation that, in my view, obliged them to do so. They have betrayed their profession. They betrayed it long ago, when they allowed Putin’s TV watchdogs to erase live television from our lives, from the lives of citizens. They then began to design a country that was pleasant for the leadership to look at. This country, ideally, either cracks up at moronic jokes, or empathizes with the heroes of dramas, or is terrified at dissected corpses, or gets divorced together with a wealthy couple, or shares a child together with a famous singer, or is moved by its leaders, who crop up in the news clips so periodically that Brezhnev would have been jealous, or in a united fit of emotion even votes for them. This television, which the new president has not abolished either, looks like a meaningless, imitation Chinese vase, decorating the empty corner of a room.

Everything that radio did should have been done by television. Live broadcast, open studios where they could have questioned specialists, intelligence officers, doctors, witnesses of the events. Live. Effective editors, conversations, attempts to come together to understand, to overcome, to grieve, to calm, to unite. And the live programming, the latest information, the reaction of the government, the reaction of the world, the reactions of people in Moscow and Vladivostok, in Grozny and Irkutsk, and so on, that this television was already capable of doing ten years ago.

Guys, you already can’t do it, you’ve lost your instincts, you’ve killed them off within political labyrinths. Now you ponder what to let on the air and whether to let it on the air at all, but people are already dead, and your viewers already hear the emergency sirens; they already know what happened, they’re already pulling out the wounded and tying tourniquets. One day later, with you, the Caucasus don’t blow up; the screen shows some kind of different, glamorous life – while it’s already blown up into a multitude of dangerous splinters that get to us everywhere, including in the capital. Television has erased real life from its programming. It has wiped society off of its screen – living, reflective, disagreeable society that is unable to afford the new housing and utilities tariffs, is unemployed and hard-working, has not become spoiled, and has not ceased to think. It has wiped out everyone from its programming who was capable of asserting our right to monitor the authorities and control over the intelligence agencies. You didn’t notice when the country stopped trusting the state, the cops, the intelligence agencies, the prosecutors, the investigators, the courts. And you. You didn’t notice because you already have come to believe that the country consists of what television shows, prepares, dresses in Prada, writes on the prompter and sends out onto the air.

How many more tragedies have to happen, and what kind, so that those who answer for and create today’s television to trembled and shook, so that the viewer became more important than the government, so that they would decide to say in a stern voice: “We’re going live.” And so that instead of Karpov, as previously scheduled, Pozner‘s guest today was a girl saved at Lubyanka Station.

Translation by theOtherRussia.org.

In an article published earlier this week by the Guardian, Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov chastises European leaders for forming increasingly close relationships with Russia and thus enabling the Kremlin’s violent suppression of free speech and human rights. Given the numerous annual murders of Russian journalists and activists and the Kremlin’s unbridled attempts to broadcast its own propaganda abroad, Kasparov calls on Europe to check these relationships at the door and reconsider its stand on human rights.

Don’t cosy up to Russia, Europe
Stifling free media, arresting journalists, bullying its neighbours – Moscow is stamping on freedoms and the EU turns a blind eye

By GARRY KASPAROV
February 23, 2010
The Guardian

In the capitals of European democracies, leaders are hailing a new era of co-operation with Russia. Berlin claims a “special relationship” with Moscow and is moving forward on a series of major energy projects with Russian energy giant Gazprom, one of which is led by the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi traveled to St Petersburg late last year to join in the celebration of his “great friend” Vladimir Putin’s 59th birthday. And in Paris, negotiations are under way for a major arms sale that would allow Russia to acquire one of the most advanced ships in the French navy.

At the same time, democratic dissent inside Russia has been ruthlessly suppressed. On 31 January, the Russian government refused to allow the peaceful assembly of citizens who demonstrated in support of … the right to free assembly, enshrined in article 31 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation: the right “to gather peacefully and to hold meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches and pickets”.

Likewise, Russian journalists have been increasingly harassed for expressing any criticism of the government. But prosecution is hardly the worst outcome for Russian journalists who fail to report the news in a “patriotic” manner. In 2009, more than dozen of journalists, human rights activists and political opponents were killed.

Having stifled internal criticism of its policies in the Caucasus, the Russian government is now turning its attention to those who criticize them from abroad – and it is being abetted in this project by European businesses and governments. The last victim of Moscow’s censors and their western friends is called Perviy Kavkazskiy (First-Caucasian). This young Russian-language television station was, until the end of January, freely available to people living in Russian-speaking areas. Now, Eutelsat – the leading European satellite provider based in Paris – has taken the channel off the air and refuses to implement the contract negotiated with the TV.

It seems the Russian company Intersputnik made Eutelsat an offer it couldn’t refuse on 15 January, holding out the possibility of millions of dollars in business with the media holdings of Russian gas giant Gazprom on the condition that Eutelsat stop doing business with First-Caucasian. Eutelsat capitulated and sent a disastrous message to the world: no Russian-language television that is not controlled by the Kremlin will be allowed to be aired in the Russian Federation. Even if it is based abroad. Even if it has a contract with a European satellite provider.

The English-language satellite channel, Russia Today, funded and controlled by the Russian government, did not face such problems with European satellites. This channel has recently launched an advertising blitz in the United States and the United Kingdom featuring billboards that show the face of US President Barack Obama morphing into that of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Nobody raised any concerns about Russia Today and western viewers will be allowed to receive the propaganda that is broadcasted in Russia. But the very idea of an alternative channel in Russian language seems too “provocative” to some Europeans.

Eutelsat’s collaboration with these policies is a clear violation of the spirit of the EU laws protecting freedom of the press, and French courts may well find that the firm violated more than just the spirit of the law as the case against Eutelstat unfolds in the coming weeks. Still, this is just the latest example of European complicity in the Kremlin’s consolidation of political power inside the country and its reconstitution of the military used to coerce those nations that lie just across the border.

This is the context in which came recent reports that the French government intends to go forward with the sale to Russia of one or more Mistral-class amphibious assault ships. The Russian military has not concealed its plan for these weapons. In September of last year, the Russian admiral Vladimir Vysotsky triumphantly declared that “a ship like this would have allowed the Black Sea fleet to accomplish its mission [invading Georgia] in 40 minutes and not 26 hours”.

Only a little more than a year ago, as Russian tanks occupied parts of Georgia, NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared that there could be “no business as usual with Russia under present circumstances”. Russian forces still occupy Georgian territory, in violation of the ceasefire brokered by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and yet NATO, too, is back to business as usual with Putin’s regime.

As Moscow shuts down opposition newspapers, arrests journalists who fail to toe the government line and bullies its democratic neighbors into submission, some European leaders are not silent. Instead they are arguing for closer ties to Moscow, for energy cooperation, for military for arms deals.

European leaders must take a stand for freedom of speech and in defense of the free media that enables it. This starts by making clear to European companies that they are not supposed to be the obedient tools of the Kremlin’s censorship. The same leaders should also show that, at the beginning of the 21st century, one cannot occupy a foreign territory without consequence. It clearly does not imply selling weapons to occupation forces. At stake is not only the freedom of Russian citizens, but also the very meaning and the honor of Europe.

• The following people endorse this article: Elena Bonner-Sakharov; Konstantin Borovoï, chairman of the Party for Economic Freedom; Vladimir Boukovsky, former political prisoner; Natalia Gorbanevskaia, poet, former political prisoner; Andreï Illarionov, former adviser to Vladimir Putin; Garry Kasparov, leader of United Citizens Front; Serguei Kovaliev, former minister to Boris Yeltsin; Andreï Mironov, former political prisoner; Andreï Nekrasov, filmmaker; Valeria Novodvorskaya, leader of Democratic Unity of Russia; Oleg Panfilov, TV presenter; Grigory Pasko, journalist, ecology activist, former political prisoner; Leonid Pliouchtch, essayist, former political prisoner; Alexandre Podrabinek, journalist, former political prisoner; Zoïa Svetova, journalist; Maïrbek Vatchagaev, historian; Tatiana Yankelevitch, archivist, Harvard; Lydia Youssoupova, lawyer

Theotherrussia.org provides glimpses into the Russian media, documenting self-censorship, spin, and other inaccuracies.

TV Channel Pulls Putin Caricature

The 2×2 television channel, which broadcasts primarily animated series, was taking no chances after it had a scare involving its license last fall.  In its latest season of the popular South Park cartoon, the channel has edited out the character representing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the Novy Region Information Agency reports.

Putin was shown in a scene receiving a phone call from one of the young characters in the cartoon, asking to help him blast a whale to the moon.  In the sketch, Putin thinks that he is receiving a prank call from US President George W. Bush.  The clip came from the “Free Willzyx” episode first broadcast in 2005, when Putin was the President of Russia.

2×2, which started broadcasting in 2007, faced the threat of license revocation in 2008, after a hardline Christian group filed suit for alleged extremism in 12 cartoon series shown by the station.  The channel was issued a warning from Russia’s media monitoring body, and management eventually pulled the offending cartoons.  In the end, the station managed to renew its license after a public campaign to save the channel garnered more than 50,000 signatures.  In June, Russian authorities retracted the warning against 2×2.

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Russia Today Invents “Mystery”

Russia Today, a government-funded news channel that broadcasts in English, was meanwhile busy spinning US President Barack Obama’s meeting with the Russian opposition.  The Chessbase news blog breaks down the not-so-subtle slant in the reporting, which downplayed the political career of United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov.

The coverage described what Russian opposition leaders said to Obama as a “mystery,” despite the fact that transcripts of the statements made by the opposition have been made publicly available.

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Deputy Reinterprets Obama’s Words

State Duma Deputy Konstantin Kosachev was quick to reinterpret Barack Obama’s position on Georgia for the Russian public.  Kosachev, who chairs the Duma Committee on International Affairs, said the following at a July 8th press conference.  The sound byte of Obama’s supposed reversal of the US position on the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was then repeated frequently throughout the media cycle.  Kosachev was responding to a question on the US support for Georgian territorial integrity.

“Obama affirmed the well known US position,” Kosachev said, “but a clear assertion followed in the same statement, that this territorial integrity must not be restored through military means.  I take these words as a signal to Tbilisi.  A serious transformation of the American position has appeared here.

“Yes, we differ on this issue, but there is no longer the same absoluteness in the words of the US representatives, as there was during the time of the George Bush administration.  Barack Obama understands the haste of the judgments made in August 2008.  And during our interactions, American congressmen admit that they obviously rushed to judgement.  This affirms the truth of our position.”

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Russian Media Imagine Agreement on Oil Price at G8 Summit

The Russian media were quick to report a statement from President Dmitri Medvedev’s office, that Medvedev had floated $70-80 per barrel as a fair world oil price.  Unfortunately, they also didn’t delve too deeply into the second part of the statement, where spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said that “G8 leaders generally agreed in their remarks.”

While news outlets spun the report as a success by Medvedev, other world leaders were more than skeptical. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had this to say in response:

“We didn’t discuss a specific figure and we didn’t discuss in detail any price range … There’s no agreement on ranges.”

After landing, Timoshenko saw that his bag had been opened up. The cup, which is named after the famous Georgian chess player Nona Gaprindashvili, was broken and the stone had vanished.

The group carrying the cup had flown through Frankfurt on their way back to Kiev. It was in Frankfurt that they were forced to check the cup into baggage. On the previous flight from Dresden they were allowed to take it onboard as a carry-on piece.

The president of the Ukranian Chess Federation, Viktor Petrov, has already filed a report with the police.

Mikhael Kravets, Deputy director of aviation security at Boryspil Airport, said that Georgians might be involved in the theft.

“Going into the the things of our passengers is widespread among Georgians,” he said. “We’re wrestling with this problem, but defeating evil that has been accumulating for many years is difficult.”

If you are also wondering how could this theft be be blamed on Georgians, comparing this story to the Russian original reveals the slip. The word for baggage handlers at airports is “gruzchik”, while Georgians in Russian are called “gruzin.” Obviously it is the baggage handlers at the Kiev airport who are suspected of stealing the diamond, not “Georgians.”

A simple error, perhaps, but it says volumes that the editor of the story found nothing odd about accusing Georgians of baggage theft out of the blue.