Russia Today and the New Cultural Cold War

By Steve Horn

This article was published at Nationof Change
Monday May 14, 2012

http://www.nationofchange.org/russia-today-and-new-cultural-cold-war-1337002874.

For those frustrated with the sorry state of the U.S.
mainstream news media, Russia Today's RT America is a
nice diversion from the norm.

With punchy coverage on political and social topics of
great importance, be it the ongoing collapse of
American news networks, domestic drone use, the U.S.
covert war in Somalia, poverty and economic inequality,
Occupy Wall Street, among many other topics, some would
even go so far to claim that it is better than the
American mainstream news press.

Recently, RT launched a show hosted by Wikileaks'
Founder Julian Assange, adding credibility, in the
judgment of some observers, to RT's slogan "question
more."

"Obviously, it would be any channel's dream right now
to get Assange, but I think it is quite natural that
his show will be on RT," RT News Executive Nikolay
Bogachikhin said of the announcement. "I mean, RT
always tries to go beyond, to see other sides of any
news story and to show the real reasons behind any news
that you would see on mainstream channels."

Yet, far from being merely another alternative-media
outlet, RT is actually a parallel entity to the United
States' Voice of America, and a key player in a 21st
century information war being waged by major powers in
the global arena.

The Rise of Russia Today

RT was dreamt up in 2001 by the Russian government and
hit the ground running in December 2005.

"The concept is said to be the idea of Mikhail Lesin, a
former media minister and now a trusted adviser to
President [Vladimir] Putin," explained Australia's The
Age.

"With a global reach of over 430 million people, or 22%
of all cable subscribers worldwide, RT news covers the
major issues of our time for viewers wishing to
question more," reads its Corporate Profile. "The best
of our broadcast can be found at RT's YouTube channel,
where the number of views has already exceeded half a
billion, making RT the first TV news channel to break
this record in YouTube's history."

RT's slogan of "question more" bears a superficial
resemblance to a true independent media's espousal of
deep-digging, fearless journalism. But, not
surprisingly given its parentage, RT's underlying
mission is quite different.

Margarita Simonyan, RT's Editor-in-Chief, is a former
member of the Kremlin Pool, the Russian version of the
White House Press Corps.

"To be picked for the Kremlin press pool is an honor
but also a sign of trustworthiness. The pool is a place
for the most loyal of the loyalists," the Columbia
Journalism Review explained. "To be assigned to cover
the Russian president, especially for television, a
reporter has to be absolutely reliable in his docility,
and in his ability to ask softball questions."

Simonyan's transition from the Kremlin pool to RT was
quite logical based on its funding stream -- some $30
million per year -- which comes from RIA Novosti, a
Russian state-owned news agency, according to The Age.

RT says that its purpose is to portray Russia in a
light not often portrayed in the western world.

"It will be a perspective on the world from Russia,"
Simonyan said of the network's 2005 launch. "Many
foreigners are surprised to see that Russia is
different from what they see in media reports. We will
try to present a more balanced picture."

Certainly, viewers of RT America will get a different
picture of Russia, and of the United States, from
anything seen on American television. And this can
indeed provide a salutary balance.

Recent examples of praise-worthy RT America coverage
that would rarely, if ever appear in the U.S.
mainstream media include on-the-ground coverage of the
role of British repression -- a close U.S. ally -- on
the one year anniversary of the Bahraini Uprising;
Iran's threat to cut off fuel exports to the EU, the
reaction to a push to war in Iran the US mainstream
media is leading; and the Pentagon's seeking of $3
billion from Congress for the ongoing occupation in
Iraq, which outlets like NBC said was "over" long ago.

That said, how reliable a news source can a
state-funded agency be?

RT: A 21st Century  Radio Moscow and "Soft Power"
Projection

According to British scholar Kristin Roth-Ey, RT itself
is best seen as a new-fangled Radio Moscow, a key part
of what she refers to as Russia's new "Cultural Cold
War."

A relic of the Soviet Union, Radio Moscow has since
morphed into Voice of Russia, with a similar raison
d'etre as its U.S.-based rival, Voice of America (VOA):
to disseminate white propaganda, packaged as "objective
news," across the world. RT sits under the auspices of
Voice of Russia.

"Clearly, RT is a more sophisticated operation than the
old Radio Moscow, both technologically speaking and in
how it approaches its mission," explained Christopher
Simpson, Professor of Communication Studies at American
University in an interview with Nation of Change. "Like
the Voice of America, it presents itself to viewers as
being a legitimate news site, or at least what most
viewers would interpret or view as a legitimate news
site."

RT and VOA compete with one another in a geopolitical
game of soft power global influence peddling.

"The American jargon to explain this, which has often
been adopted by governments abroad, is the concept of 
'soft power,' of influence, the ability to persuade
through measures short of military confrontation, of
cultural influence, and the players in this arena are
quite conscious of soft power as a goal," Simpson said.
"And one of the things that is different about modern
day propaganda, from say, its WWI or WWII grandfathers,
if you will, is that it tends to be more subtle, more
appealing to what the audience wants, as opposed to
what it fears."

These types of outfits are not unique to Russia and the
United States -- most of the global powers maintain
international broadcast channels of this sort. Other
examples include, but are not limited to China Radio
International, Israel Radio International, and Iran's
Press TV.

Among the most famous of these is the British
Broadcasting Company (BBC), whose global outreach
counterpart is the BBC Worldwide.

While BBC is funded by British taxpayer money via the
Communications Act 2003, BBC Worldwide is funded by the
UK's State Department, the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office. Reflecting its "soft power" projection mission,
BBC Worldwide was formerly known as the BBC Empire
Service, as it served as a tool of the former British
Empire.

BBC and BBC Worldwide have been criticized by critical
observers for favoring the Israeli narrative on the
Israel-Palestine conflict, for often adhering to the
pro-government line at any given moment, and for
supporting the British government's narrative at face
value of its involvement in the 2003 invasion and
ongoing occupation in Iraq.

Perhaps most egregiously, "the BBC allowed Britain's
domestic security agency, MI5, to investigate the
backgrounds and political affiliations of thousands of
its employees, including newsreaders, reporters and
continuity announcers...The BBC's reliance on MI5
reached a peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s," the
London Telegraph reported in July 2006.

Put most bluntly, there is no such thing as a free
lunch when government funding is in the mix, regardless
of the country involved.

The Costs and Consequences of Real Independent
Journalism in Russia

A case study of the costs and consequences of real
independent journalism in Russia can be seen through
the lens of the Russian independent news publication,
Novaya Gazeta. The Gazeta is described by The Guardian
as one "dedicated to real journalism, unlike Russian
television and most other newspapers, all under Putin's
thumb."

"Since 1999, when Vladimir Putin [took power] thirteen
journalists have been murdered in Russia," according to
a 2007 story by The New Yorker. A fourteenth --
Anastasia Baburova -- a reporter for the Novaya Gazeta,
was killed in 2009.

The most infamous murder occurred in 2006, with the
slaying of Anna Politkovskaya, a well-known critic of
President Vladamir Putin and author of the book Putin's
Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy.

In a review of her book, The Guardian wrote in ominous
fashion, "Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this
collection is that it feels like a Soviet-era
dissident's book. Her pieces have that slightly
desperate pitch of someone who fears no one is
listening - that her own people have given up and that
the outside world does not want to hear, or worse, does
not care."

As these examples make clear, there is a steep price to
pay when journalists fail to toe the line of the
Kremlin. As a result, Simpson explains, Russian
journalists, if they do not want to risk their lives,
develop an acute "sense of smell."

"In Russia, journalists don't get memos from the
government, but as the Washington Post recently pointed
out, they have an acute 'sense of smell,' and using the
sense of smell, they're able to adjust their line,
their presentation, and the content of the broadcast to
suit the powers that be in that particular country. And
I think that's the best way to explain it," remarked
Simpson. "The usefulness of this sense of smell is that
it protects that executive or individual in his/her
effort to win favor within the social/bureaucratic
class structure of that particular society."

A U.S. Mirror Image Out East?

Many would contend that the United States-- unlike
Russia, where independent journalists are sometimes
killed by the government --has a robust independent
media to hold the powers-that-be in check.

Simpson argues it's not so cut and dry, though.

"I think it's a misunderstanding to contend the U.S.
doesn't have state-run media operations," he explained.
"The structure of the corporate media in the U.S. is
quite different than that of Russia and I don't want to
pretend they're not quite different, but nevertheless,
the U.S. government spends billions of dollars a year
doing domestic propaganda through the Pentagon, through
press releases, through various interest groups, and
through PR for products or for businesses that
basically run on federal contracts. In addition, the
U.S. has very large media aimed at its armed forces,
its bases and so on. Taken together those news outlets
have a substantial and measurable impact on perception
of the government in this country."

He continued, "And, perhaps most fundamentally, in the
western media, you have a situation in which the
mainstream media have a love/hate relationship with the
government and the media organizations are essentially
subordinate to the government. Frankly, there are more
similarities between the media structure in the US and
the media structure in Russia than either country is
willing to admit to itself or each other."

An Ode to Truly Independent Investigative Journalism

That RT, a creature of the Putin-led Russian
government, has found a mass market in the U.S. says as
much about the state of our own journalism industry, as
it does about Putin's success in projecting "soft
power" to the western world. U.S. citizens are in
desperate search for journalism that serves as a voice
for the voiceless and speaks truth to power -- so
desperate, in fact, that RT is in many ways filling a
void.

Real independent journalism, though, has loyalty to
only one thing: the truth and the whole truth, not
piecemeal truths selected to support the agenda of
whoever funds it.

This article was published at NationofChange at:
http://www.nationofchange.org/russia-today-and-new-
cultural-cold-war-1337002874. All rights are reserved.

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