RT (TV network)

• 1. Introduction

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  RT launched on the 10th of December 2005 with a simple, explicit goal: to show the world a different Russia. At its founding, RIA Novosti director Svetlana Mironyuk put the problem bluntly. In the West, she said, Russia was associated with three words: communism, snow, and poverty. The new channel, called Russia Today, would offer what she described as "a more complete picture of life" in the country. Three hundred journalists filled the newsroom on day one, roughly seventy of them recruited from outside Russia. A 25-year-old former Kremlin pool reporter named Margarita Simonyan was handed the editor-in-chief's chair. She had been working in journalism since she was 18. By the time RT reached its twentieth year, it had become one of the most watched and most contested news operations on earth. The questions the channel raises are not merely about Russia. They are about how propaganda works, who believes it, and whether "the information war" is even winnable.

• 2. Born From a PR Problem

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  RT was conceived by former media minister Mikhail Lesin and Aleksei Gromov as a public relations effort by the Russian government in 2005. The founding body, ANO TV-Novosti, was registered on the 6th of April 2005 and Sergey Frolov was appointed its CEO. Start-up costs came to $30 million, matched by a first-year operating budget of the same size. Half the money came directly from the Russian government; the other half came from pro-Kremlin commercial banks at the government's request. The framing from the outset positioned RT alongside channels like France 24 and TeleSUR, which also saw themselves as offering an alternative to Western-dominated news flows. Journalist Danny Schechter, who had been part of CNN's launch staff, watched RT and recognized the pattern: a room full of young people, inexperienced but enthusiastic. During the global economic crisis of December 2008, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's government placed ANO TV-Novosti on a list of organizations of strategic national importance. That designation signaled something beyond a press-office vanity project. The Russian state had decided this channel was infrastructure. Putin himself made explicit his reasoning when he visited RT's new broadcasting centre in June 2013, stating: "We wanted to introduce another strong player on the international scene... to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams."

• 3. Building the Network

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  In August 2007, an RT crew joined the Arktika 2007 Russian polar expedition led by Artur Chilingarov aboard the Akademik Fyodorov icebreaker, making Russia Today the first television channel to report live from the North Pole. The live report lasted five minutes and 41 seconds. It was a vivid demonstration of what the channel was building: reach and spectacle. Arabic-language channel Rusiya Al-Yaum followed in 2007, Spanish-language Actualidad RT in 2009, RT America in 2010, and an RT Documentary channel in 2011. A German-language channel launched in 2014 and French in 2017, though the sharp ruble decline at the end of 2014 had forced both to be postponed from earlier plans. By March 2022, the network's feed was carried by 22 satellites and more than 230 operators, delivering a distribution reach to around 700 million households in more than 100 countries. Staffing grew rapidly too: from 300 journalists at launch to 2,000 by 2010. The annual budget rose from approximately $80 million in 2007 to $380 million in 2011 before settling at $300 million in 2012. President Putin personally prohibited any reduction in RT's funding on the 30th of October 2012. By 2014, RT received 11.87 billion rubles, equivalent to around $310 million, in government funding. That same year, about 80 percent of RT's costs were incurred outside Russia, including paying partner networks approximately $260 million for distribution.

• 4. The Rebranding Gamble

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  In 2009, Russia Today dropped its full name and became simply RT. George Washington University academics Jack Nassetta and Kimberly Gross described it as an attempt to shed state affiliation. Simonyan offered a more commercial explanation: who, she asked, is interested in watching news from Russia all day long? The corporate logo changed, not the corporate structure. That same year, with the Barack Obama administration arriving in Washington promising a reset with Moscow, journalist Julia Ioffe noted that RT became more international and less aggressively anti-American, building a new studio and newsroom in the U.S. capital. In early 2010, RT unveiled an advertising campaign around a new slogan: "Question More." The campaign was created by Ketchum, GPlus, and London's Portland PR. One advertisement showed President Obama morphing into Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asked: "Who poses the greatest nuclear threat?" The ad was banned in American airports. Another showed a Western soldier merging with a Taliban fighter. One of the 2010 billboard advertisements won the British Awards for National Newspaper Advertising "Ad of the Month." The branding effort attracted the attention of Walter Isaacson, Chairman of the U.S. Government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia. He called publicly for more investment in those programs, saying the U.S. could not afford "to be out-communicated by our enemies" and naming Russia Today in the same breath. In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told lawmakers the United States was "losing the information war" abroad to foreign channels including RT, Al Jazeera, and China Central Television.

• 5. Propaganda or Platform

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  Margarita Simonyan compared RT directly to the Russian Ministry of Defence in 2012, saying the channel had been "waging an information war... with the entire Western world" since the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. RT itself named Georgia as the aggressor against South Ossetia and Abkhazia in that conflict. Yet RT's domestic editorial reality was more complicated than a uniform propaganda machine. According to a 2010 report by a British newspaper, RT journalists said direct criticism of Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev was not permitted, but coverage of other sensitive issues was allowed. Research published in the journal Security Studies in 2021 found that viewers exposed to RT became more likely to support the withdrawal of the United States from its role as a cooperative global leader by a margin of 10-20 percent. The study noted that this effect held across party lines and persisted even when viewers were told RT was financed by the Russian government. Yet exposure to RT produced no measurable effect on Americans' views of domestic politics or the Russian government. Graduate students at Columbia School of Journalism who monitored RT's U.S. output for much of 2015 concluded that RT ignores basic journalistic practices: checking sources, relaying facts, attempting honest reportage. The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab later found that RT aggressively promoted COVID-19 vaccination for its Russian-language audience while simultaneously saturating its English, German, French, Spanish, and Arabic platforms with anti-vaccination content. The same network broadcast opposite public health messages to different audiences at the same time.

• 6. Famous Guests, Fringe Voices

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  Julian Assange's show World Tomorrow debuted on RT on the 17th of April 2012. The first guest was Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who rarely gives interviews to Western media; commentators called this a "coup." Assange said RT gave his guests space to discuss things they "could not say on a mainstream TV network" and that he retained full editorial control. He also acknowledged that if WikiLeaks had published large volumes of compromising data on Russia, his relationship with RT might not have been so comfortable. In May 2013, RT announced that former CNN host Larry King would host a new talk show on the network called Politicking. The first preview telecast, on the 13th of June 2013, focused on Edward Snowden's leaking of the PRISM surveillance program. King said in an RT advertisement: "I would rather ask questions to people in positions of power, instead of speaking on their behalf." RT also gave airtime to former Iraq War Marine veteran and anti-war activist Adam Kokesh from April to August 2011, and to The Alyona Show, which ran from 2009 to 2012 and whose host Alyona Minkovski was described by one journalist as "probably the best interviewer on cable news." Alongside those respected names, RT also hosted neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, and various conspiracy theorists, often presenting them with descriptors like "human rights activists." Nigel Farage appeared on RT eighteen times between 2010 and 2014. Steve Bannon stated he had appeared on RT "probably 100 times or more." RT News repeatedly hosted white supremacist Richard B. Spencer airing his views in support of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and hosted Holocaust denier Ryan Dawson while presenting him as a human rights activist.

• 7. Bans and the Invasion

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  On the 27th of February 2022, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced the European Union would ban RT and Sputnik from all 27 member countries. RT had already been banned in Ukraine in 2014 after Russia's annexation of Crimea; Latvia and Lithuania had followed in 2020; Germany banned RT DE on the 2nd of February 2022. The EU ban triggered a cascade. Canadian telecoms Shaw, Rogers, Bell, and Telus all dropped RT. On the 28th of February, Ofcom announced 15 expedited investigations into RT news editions from a single day. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok made RT's content unavailable to EU users the same day. On the 1st of March, YouTube banned RT across Europe. On the 11th of March, YouTube blocked it worldwide. Apple removed the RT app from every country except Russia. DirecTV pulled RT America from its lineup. In March 2022, RT America closed and most of its staff stopped working for the outlet. Between the 22nd and the 26th of February 2022, posts from RT and Sputnik on Facebook received more than 5 million likes, shares, and comments. On YouTube, videos advancing false claims that Ukrainians had attacked Russians were watched 73 million times. RT also began selling merchandise bearing the "Z" military symbol, a pro-war emblem, days after the invasion began. RT challenged the EU ban in the General Court of the Court of Justice of the European Union on the 8th of March 2022. The court dismissed the case on the 27th of July 2022, ruling the ban was justified. Meanwhile, interactions with RT's Arabic-language Facebook page grew 161.2 percent between late February and mid-March 2022, showing that not every branch of the network declined after the ban.

• 8. Reach Versus Reality

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  In 2013, RT became the first television news channel to reach 1 billion views on YouTube, a milestone it touted loudly. Yet leaked internal documents from a former RIA Novosti employee, cited by an American publication, showed RT's own figures hugely overstated its viewership. Between 2013 and 2015, over 80 percent of RT's viewership came from videos of accidents, crime, disasters, and natural phenomena. The most popular video of Vladimir Putin shows him singing "Blueberry Hill" at a 2010 charity event in Saint Petersburg. In 2017, analysis by a major American newspaper concluded that RT was not especially effective as a propaganda arm, largely because its political content was so rarely watched. At the end of 2015, all 20 of the most-watched videos on RT's main channel totaled 300 million views, and all were categorized as disaster or novelty content. According to internal documents submitted for Kremlin review, RT's viewership amounted to less than 0.1 percent of Europe's television audience, except in Britain, where 2013 viewership was estimated at 120,000 persons per day. In August 2015, RT's average weekly viewing figure in the UK had fallen to around 450,000 people, which was 100,000 fewer than in June 2012 and less than half the audience of Al Jazeera English. Author Peter Pomerantsev argued that large audience ratings were never RT's primary goal. Its campaigns served financial, political, and media influence objectives. RT and Sputnik, he wrote, create the raw material used by thousands of fake news propagators. Research by the BBC found that viewer trust in RT globally averaged 71 percent in 2025, up from 59 percent four years earlier. On the 16th of September 2024, Meta announced it would ban RT from Facebook and Instagram entirely for foreign interference activity.