RT

History

Foundation

RT's formation was part of a public relations effort by the Russian Government in 2005 to improve Russia's image abroad. RT was conceived by former media minister Mikhail Lesin and Aleksei Gromov. At the time of RT's founding, RIA Novosti director Svetlana Mironyuk stated: "Unfortunately, at the level of mass consciousness in the West, Russia is associated with three words: communism, snow and poverty", and added "we would like to present a more complete picture of life in our country". RT is funded by the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Media, part of the government of Russia.

In 2005, RIA Novosti founded ANO TV-Novosti (or "Autonomous Non-profit Organization TV-News") to serve as the parent organization for RT. ANO TV-Novosti was registered on 6 April 2005, and Sergey Frolov (Сергей Фролов) was appointed its CEO.

The channel was launched as Russia Today on 10 December 2005. At its launch, the channel employed 300 journalists, including approximately 70 from outside Russia. Russia Today appointed Margarita Simonyan as its editor-in-chief; she recruited foreign journalists as presenters and consultants.

Simonyan, aged 25 years old when she was appointed, was a former Kremlin pool reporter who had worked in journalism since she was 18. She told The New York Times that after the fall of the Soviet Union, many new young journalists were hired, resulting in a much younger pool of staffers than other news organizations. Journalist Danny Schechter (who has appeared as a guest on RT) stated that, having been part of the launch staff at CNN, he saw RT as another "channel of young people who are inexperienced, but very enthusiastic about what they are doing". Shortly after the channel was launched, James Painter wrote that RT and similar news channels such as France 24 and TeleSUR saw themselves as "counter-hegemonic", offering a differing vision and news content from that of Western media like CNN and the BBC.

Development and expansion

RT launched several new channels in ensuing years: the Arabic language channel Rusiya Al-Yaum in 2007, the Spanish language channel Actualidad RT in 2009, RT America – which focuses on the United States – in 2010, and the RT Documentary channel in 2011.

In August 2007, Russia Today became the first television channel to report live from the North Pole (with the report lasting five minutes and 41 seconds). An RT crew participated in the Arktika 2007 Russian polar expedition, led by Artur Chilingarov on the Akademik Fyodorov icebreaker. On 31 December 2007, RT's broadcasts of New Year's Eve celebrations in Moscow and Saint Petersburg were broadcast in the hours prior to the New Year's Eve event at New York City's Times Square.

Russia Today drew particular attention worldwide for its coverage of the 2008 South Ossetia war. RT named Georgia as the aggressor against the separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were protected by Russian troops. RT saw this as the incident that showcased its newsgathering abilities to the world. Margarita Simonyan stated: "we were the only ones among the English-language media who were giving the other side of the story – the South Ossetian side of the story".

In 2009, Russia Today was rebranded to "RT", which George Washington University academics Jack Nassetta and Kimberly Gross described as an "[attempt] to shed state affiliation". Simonyan said the company had not changed names but the company's corporate logo was changed to attract more viewers: "who is interested in watching news from Russia all day long?"

Julia Ioffe also describes 2009, when the Barack Obama administration came to office "promising a different approach toward Russia", as a time when RT became "more international and less anti-American", and "built a state-of-the-art studio and newsroom" in the U.S. capital

In early 2010, RT unveiled an advertising campaign to promote its new "Question More" slogan. The campaign was created by Ketchum, GPlus, and London's Portland PR. One of the advertisements featured as part of the campaign showed U.S. President Barack 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 and asked: "Is terror only inflicted by terrorists?" One of RT's 2010 billboard advertisements won the British Awards for National Newspaper Advertising "Ad of the Month".

2012–2021

In early 2012, shortly after his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul challenged Margarita Simonyan on Twitter about allegations from RT that he had sent Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny to study at Yale University. According to RT, McFaul was referring to a comment in an article by political scientist Igor Panarin, which RT had specified were the views of the author. McFaul then accepted an interview by Sophie Shevardnadze on RT on this and other issues and reasserted that the Obama administration wanted a "reset" in relations with Russia.

On 17 April 2012, RT debuted World Tomorrow, a news interview programme hosted by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The first guest on the program was Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The interview made global headlines as Nasrallah rarely gives interviews to Western media. Commentators described this as a "coup". WikiLeaks described the show as "a series of in-depth conversations with key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world". It stated that the show is "independently produced and Assange has control"; WikiLeaks offers a "Broadcasters license, only".

Assange said that RT allowed his guests to discuss things that they "could not say on a mainstream TV network". Assange's production company made the show and Assange had full editorial control. Assange said that, if WikiLeaks had published large amounts of compromising data on Russia, his relationship with RT might not have been so comfortable. In August of that year, RT suffered a denial of service attack. Some people linked the attack to RT's connection with Assange, and others to an impending court verdict related to Pussy Riot.

On 23 October 2012, RT, along with Al Jazeera and C-SPAN, broadcast the Free and Equal Elections Foundation third-party debate among four third-party candidates for President of the United States. On 5 November, RT broadcast the two candidates that were voted winners of that debate, Libertarian Party candidate Governor Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, from RT's Washington, D.C. studio.

In May 2013, RT announced that former CNN host Larry King would host a new talk show on RT. King said in an advertisement on RT: "I would rather ask questions to people in positions of power, instead of speaking on their behalf." As part of the deal, King would also bring his Hulu series Larry King Now to RT. On 13 June 2013, RT aired a preview telecast of King's new Thursday evening program Politicking, with the episode discussing Edward Snowden's leaking of the PRISM surveillance program.

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

On 27 February 2022, the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced the European Union would ban RT and Sputnik (plus their subsidiaries) from operating in its 27 member countries. The ban resulted in RT being blocked on downstream television networks located outside EU, such as the United Kingdom and Singapore as they were dependent on EU companies for the signal feed to RT. Canadian telecom companies Shaw, Rogers, Bell and Telus announced they would no longer offer RT in their channel lineups (although Rogers replaced its RT broadcasts with a Ukrainian flag). This move was praised by Canada's Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez who called the network the "propaganda arm" of Vladimir Putin. On 28 February, Ofcom announced they had opened 15 expedited investigations into RT. These investigations will be focused on the 15 news editions broadcast on 27 February between 05:00 and 19:00 and will check if the coverage broke impartiality requirements in the broadcast code. On 2 March, the regulation was published which meant the ban was in force.

Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok made RT's and Sputnik's social media content unavailable to users in the European Union on 28 February. Microsoft removed RT and Sputnik from MSN, the Microsoft Store, and the Microsoft Advertising network on the same day. YouTube, on 1 March, banned access to all RT and Sputnik channels on its platform in Europe (including Britain). Apple followed by removing RT and Sputnik from its App Store in all countries except Russia. Roku dropped the RT app from its channel store, while DirecTV pulled RT America from its channel lineup. On 1 March, the National Administration of Telecommunications of Uruguay announced the removal of RT from the Antel TV streaming platform. New Zealand satellite television provider Sky also removed RT, citing complaints from customers and consultation with the Broadcasting Standards Authority. Reddit blocked new outgoing links to RT and Sputnik on 3 March. On 11 March, YouTube blocked RT and Sputnik worldwide. From 16 March, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission officially banned RT and RT France from the list of non-Canadian programming services authorized for distribution.

On 8 March 2022, RT France challenged the EU ban of its activities in the General Court of the Court of Justice of the European Union. After refusing to "urgently" consider the case on 30 March, the General Court dismissed the case on 27 July 2022, ruling that the ban against RT was justified.

2023–present

In September 2023, RT launched its online platform in Portuguese, as "RT Brazil".

On 9 August 2024, the broadcast and other equipment from the RT studio in Washington DC were auctioned off.

On 16 September 2024, Meta announced that it would ban RT from its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, for foreign interference activity.

Research by the BBC found that viewer trust in RT globally averaged 71% in 2025, increased from 59% four years previously.

Organization

State-owned RIA Novosti news agency, which founded RT in 2005, is one of the largest in Russia. Its former chairperson was Svetlana Mironyuk, who modernised the agency after being appointed in 2003.

In 2007, RT established offices in the same building as RIA Novosti, after the Russian Union of Journalists was forced to vacate them. In 2012, Anna Kachkayeva, Dean of Media Communications at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, stated that the two organizations "share the same roof" because they are located in the same building, but in "funding, editorial policy, management and staff, they are two independent organisations whose daily operations are not interconnected in any way". In 2008, Simonyan noted that more than 50 young RT journalists had gone on to take positions in large Western media outlets. By 2010, RT's staff had grown to 2,000.

In December 2012, RT moved its production studios and headquarters to a new facility in Moscow. The move coincided with RT's upgrade of all of its English-language news programming to high-definition.

In 2013, a presidential decree issued by Vladimir Putin dissolved RIA Novosti, replacing it with a new information agency called Rossiya Segodnya (directly translated as Russia Today). On 31 December 2013, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the RT news channel, was also appointed editor-in-chief of the new news agency while maintaining her duties for the television network.

From 18 August 2020 to 18 August 2021, ANO TV Novosti was owned by the federal state unitary enterprise RAMI RIA Novosti (Russian: ФГУП "РАМИ "РИА Новости") and the Association for the Development of International Journalism (ADIJ; Russian: Ассоциация развития международной журналистики (АРМЖ)), which was founded by Margarita Simonyan and few other RT associates. On 18 August 2021, RAMI RIA Novosti was liquidated and the ownership of ANO TV Novosti was transferred to ADIJ.

Budget

When it was established in 2005, ANO TV-Novosti invested $30 million in start-up costs to establish RT, with a budget of $30 million for its first year of operation. Half of the network's budget came from the Russian government; the other half came from pro-Kremlin commercial banks at the government's request. Its annual budget increased from approximately $80 million in 2007 to $380 million in 2011, but was reduced to $300 million in 2012.[1] President Putin prohibited the reduction of funding for RT on 30 October 2012.

About 80 percent of RT's costs are incurred outside Russia, paying partner networks around $260 million for the distribution of its channels in 2014. In 2014, RT received 11.87 billion rubles ($310 million) in government funding and was expected to receive 15.38 billion rubles ($400 million) in 2015. (For comparison, the bigger BBC World Service Group had a $376 million budget in 2014–15.) At the start of 2015, as the ruble's value plummeted and a ten percent reduction in media subsidies was imposed, it was thought that RT's budget for the year would fall to about $236 million. Instead, government funding was increased to 20.8 billion rubles (around $300 million) in September. In 2015, RT was expected to receive 19 billion rubles ($307 million) from the Russian government the following year. As of 2022, RT is the leader in terms of state funding among all Russian media. Between 2022 and 2024, RT will receive 82 billion rubles.

Network

According to RT as of March 2022, the network's feed is carried by 22 satellites and over 230 operators, providing a distribution reach to about 700 million households in more than 100 countries. RT also stated that RT America was available to 85 million households throughout the United States, as of 2012.

In addition to its main English language channel RT International, RT UK and RT America, RT also runs Arabic-language channel Rusiya Al-Yaum, Spanish language channel Actualidad RT, as well as the RTDoc documentary channel. RT maintains 21 bureaus in 16 countries, including those in Washington, D.C., New York City; London, England; Paris, France; Delhi, India; Cairo, Egypt and Baghdad, Iraq.

The sharp decline in the ruble at the end of 2014 forced RT to postpone German- and French-language channels.

In addition to news agency Ruptly, RT also operates the following websites: RT на русском (in Russian), RT en français (French), RT DE (German).

In 2015, RT's YouTube news channels were: RT (the main channel), RT America, RT Arabic, RT en Español, RT Deutsch, RT French, RT UK, RT на русском and the newly launched RT Chinese.

The German service (RT DE) was removed from YouTube in September 2021 for breaking the websites rules on COVID misinformation. The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and Meduza wrote that the Russian edition of RT "aggressively" promoted COVID-19 vaccination in Russia, calling anti-vaccination activists "imbeciles", while foreign RT channels were simultaneously promoting the same anti-vaccination misinformation that it criticized in Russia.

In September 2012, RT signed a contract with Israeli-based RRSat to distribute high-definition feeds of the channel in the United States, Latin America and Asia. In October 2012, RT's Rusiya Al-Yaum and RT joined the high-definition network Al Yah Satellite Communications ("YahLive"). On 12 July 2014, during his visit to Argentina, Putin announced that Actualidad RT would broadcast free-to-air in the country, the first foreign television channel to do so there. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Argentina's State Media Authorities decided to suspend RT on 11 June 2016, along with Venezuelan television channel TeleSur, which had both been authorized by the previous left-leaning government of Cristina Kirchner. Officially, Argentina wanted to devote RT's frequency to domestic broadcasts. RT was made available on the dominant Australian subscription television platform Foxtel on 17 February 2015.

Ratings/impact

Audience ratings

The RT website (as of March 2022), maintains that "since June 2012", RT has "consistently and significantly outperforms other foreign channels including Euronews and Fox News. RT's quarterly audience in the UK is 2.5 million viewers". However, according to The Daily Beast, citing leaked documents from "Vasily Gatov, a former RIA Novosti employee" (as of 2015) RT "hugely exaggerates its viewership,"; and its most-watched segments were on apolitical subjects. Between 2013 and 2015, over 80% of RT's viewership was for videos of accidents, crime, disasters, and natural phenomena, such as the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor event, with less than 1% of viewership for political videos. In late 2015, all of the 20 most-watched videos on its main channel, totaling 300 million views, were described as "disaster/novelty". Of the top 100, only a small number could be categorized as political, with only one covering Ukraine. The most popular video of Russian president Putin shows him singing "Blueberry Hill" at a 2010 St. Petersburg charity event. In 2017, The Washington Post analysed RT's popularity and concluded that "it's not very good at its job" as "Moscow's propaganda arm" due to its relative unpopularity. RT has disputed both The Daily Beast and The Washington Post assessments, saying their analyses used outdated viewership data.

A study by Professor Robert Orttung at George Washington University stated that RT uses human interest stories without ideological content to attract viewers to its channels. Between January and May 2015, the Russian-language channel had the most viewers, with approximately double the number of the main channel, despite only having around one-third the number of subscribers.

According to data compiled by Oxford's Rasmus Kleis Nielsen prior to the invasion of Ukraine, RT's "online reach in the U.K., France, and Germany" was "not great on the web, but surprisingly strong on social media, at least in spots". For example, in Germany, RT was "the No. 1 news source in terms of engagements on Facebook" December 2021-January 2022, (according to this CrowdTangle data).

Reliable figures for RT's worldwide audience were not available as of 2015. In the United States, RT typically pays cable and satellite services to carry its channel in subscriber packages. In 2011, RT was the second most-watched foreign news channel in the United States (after BBC World News), and the number one foreign network in five major U.S. urban areas in 2012. It also rated well among younger Americans under 35 and in inner city areas.

Programming

In 2008, Heidi Brown wrote in Forbes that "the Kremlin is using charm, good photography and a healthy dose of sex appeal to appeal to a diverse, skeptical audience. The result is entertaining – and ineffably Russian." She added that Russia Today has managed to "get foreigners to at least consider the Russian viewpoint – however eccentric it may be..." Matt Field in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists described RT as "applying high-quality graphics and production values to its stories", often focusing "on polarizing issues that aren't necessarily top-of-mind for viewers" and sometimes "strikingly at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin's own views".

According to Tim Dowling, writing in The Guardian, "Fringe opinion takes center stage" on RT. "Reporting is routinely bolstered by testimony from experts you have never heard of, representing institutions you have never heard of."

The Alyona Show

The Alyona Show, hosted by Alyona Minkovski, ran from 2009 to 2012 (when Minkovski left RT to join The Huffington Post). Daily Beast writer Tracy Quan described The Alyona Show as "one of RT's most popular vehicles". The New Republic columnist Jesse Zwick wrote that one journalist told him that Minkovski is "probably the best interviewer on cable news". Benjamin R. Freed wrote in the avant-garde culture magazine SOMA that "The Alyona Show does political talk with razor-sharp wit." David Weigel called the show "an in-house attempt at a newsy cult hit" and noted that "her meatiest segments were about government spying, and the Federal Reserve, and America's undeclared wars". Minkovski had complained about being characterized as if she was "Putin's girl in Washington" or as being "anti-American". After Minkovski argued that Glenn Beck was "not on the side of America. And the fact that my channel is more honest with the American people is something you should be ashamed of", Columbia Journalism Review writer Julia Ioffe asked: "since when does Russia Today defend the policies of any American president? Or the informational needs of the American public, for that matter?"

Adam vs. the Man

From April to August 2011, RT ran a half-hour primetime show Adam vs. the Man, hosted by former Iraq War Marine veteran and high-profile anti-war activist Adam Kokesh. David Weigel writes that Kokesh defended RT's "propaganda" function, saying "We're putting out the truth that no one else wants to say. I mean, if you want to put it in the worst possible abstract, it's the Russian government, which is a competing protection racket against the other governments of the world, going against the United States and calling them on their bullshit."

World Tomorrow

Reviewing the first episode of Julian Assange's show World Tomorrow, The Independent noted that Assange, who was under house arrest, was "largely deferential" in asking some questions of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who himself was in hiding. However, he also asked tough questions such as why Nasrallah had not supported Arab revolts against Syrian leaders, when he had supported them in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, and other countries. The New York Times journalist Allesandra Stanley wrote that "practically speaking, Mr. Assange is in bed with the Kremlin, but on Tuesday's show he didn't put out" and that he "behaved surprisingly like a standard network interviewer". Douglas Lucas in Salon wrote that the RT deal "may just be a profitable way for him to get a gigantic retweet". Glenn Greenwald wrote that RT presenting the Julian Assange show led to "a predictable wave of snide, smug attacks from American media figures".

Other shows

Marcin Maczka writes that RT's ample financing has allowed RT to attract experienced journalists and use the latest technology. RT anchors and correspondents tend to concentrate on controversial world issues such as the financial and banking scandals, corporate impact on the global economy, and western demonstrations. It has also aired views by various conspiracy theorists, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Holocaust deniers (presented as "human rights activists"). News from Russia is of secondary importance and such reports emphasize Russian modernisation and economic achievements, as well as Russian culture and natural landscapes, while downplaying Russia's social problems or corruption.

#1917LIVE

In 2017, RT ran a mock live tweeting program under the hashtag "#1917LIVE" to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

The #1917Live project had multimedia social plug-ins, such as Periscope live streaming, as well as virtual reality panoramic videos.

Programs

RT's feature programs include (with presenters parenthesized):

RT's former on-air staff included 25 people from RT America.

News Thing (Sam Delaney)

Watching the Hawks (Tyrel Ventura, Sean Stone, and Tabetha Wallace)

SophieCo (Sophie Shevardnadze)

Sputnik (George Galloway) from RT UK

Politicking (Larry King)

News Views Hughes

On the Touchline with José Mourinho

In Question

Raw Take

Interdit d'interdire (Frédéric Taddeï, resigned) from RT France

On-air staff

RT's current on-air staff includes 25 people from RT News, and eight from RT UK. Notable members of RT's current and former staff include:

Guests

According to Jesse Zwick, RT persuades "legitimate experts and journalists" to appear as guests by allowing them to speak at length on issues ignored by larger news outlets. It frequently interviews progressive and libertarian academics, intellectuals and writers from organisations like The Nation, Reason, Human Events, Center for American Progress and the Cato Institute who are critical of United States foreign and civil liberties policies. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Noam Chomsky, the leftist critic of Western policies are "favorites". RT also features little-known commentators including anarchists, anti-globalists and left-wing activists. Journalist Danny Schechter holds that a primary reason for RT's success in the United States is that RT is "a force for diversity" which gives voice to people "who rarely get heard in current mainstream US media". Examples of this include "a twelve-minute interview" in March 2010 "with Hank Albarelli, a self-described American 'historian' who claims that the CIA is testing dangerous drugs on unwitting civilians", and RT's asking for commentary on the 2010 Haiti earthquake from "Carl Dix, a representative of the American Revolutionary Communist Party".

In 2010, journalist and blogger Julia Ioffe described RT as being "provocative just for the sake of being provocative" in its choice of guests and issue topics, featuring a Russian historian who predicted that the United States would soon be dissolved, showing speeches by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, reporting on homelessness in America, and interviewing the chairman of the New Black Panther Party. She wrote that in attempting to offer "an alternate point of view, it is forced to talk to marginal, offensive, and often irrelevant figures". A 2010 Southern Poverty Law Center report stated that RT extensively covered the "birther" and the "New World Order" conspiracy theories and interviewed militia organizer Jim Stachowiak and white nationalist Jared Taylor. An Al Jazeera English article stated that RT has a penchant "for off-beat stories and conspiracy theories". RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan told Nikolaus von Twickel of The Moscow Times that RT started to grow once it became provocative and that controversy was vital to the channel. She said that RT's task was not to polish Moscow's reputation. The news channel has also been criticized for its lack of objectivity in its coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Miko Peled, the Israeli peace activist who has called the peace process "a process of apartheid & colonization" is a frequent guest on RT.

Notable guests have included think tank intellectuals like Jared Bernstein, John Feffer and Lawrence Korb; journalists and writers Jacob Sullum, Pepe Escobar, and Brian Doherty, and heads of state, including Ecuador's Rafael Correa, and Syria's Bashar al-Assad. Nigel Farage, the leader of UK Independence Party from 2010 to 2016, appeared on RT eighteen times from 2010 to 2014. Steve Bannon has stated that he has appeared on RT "probably 100 times or more". Manuel Ochsenreiter, a neo-Nazi, has repeatedly appeared on RT to represent the German point of view. RT News has also frequently hosted Richard B. Spencer, an American white supremacist airing his opinions in support of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and has hosted Holocaust denier Ryan Dawson, presenting him as a human rights activist. Such figures as Alex Jones, Jim Marrs, David Ray Griffin, and Webster Tarpley have appeared on RT to advance conspiracy theories about topics such as the 11 September attacks, the Bilderberg group, and the "New World Order".

Content

RT has presented itself as a global network "like the BBC or France 24", differing from them in offering "alternative views" ignored by the "Western-dominated news media". Many Western countries, in contrast, regard RT not just as a propaganda organ, but as "the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize the West". According to Steven Erlanger, RT provides "hard news and top-notch graphics" and a "mix with interviews from all sorts of people: well known and obscure, left and right. if there is any unifying character to RT, it is a deep skepticism of Western and American narratives of the world and a fundamental defensiveness about Russia and Mr. Putin."

RT formerly hosted the leaders of populist European parties such as UKIP's leader Nigel Farage and Marie Le Pen, leader of the French Populist National Rally Party. British politician, broadcaster, and writer George Galloway formerly hosted his own TV news programme on RT named "Sputnik: Orbiting the World with George Galloway".

Propaganda and related issues

RT's editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, has described RT as giving Russia "soft power", and being the same kind of "tool" for Russia that the "BBC or CNN" are "for the UK and USA". In 2012, she stated that RT waged "an information war ... with the entire Western world" during the Russo-Georgian War.

Observers have criticized the state-supported/controlled nature of RT as an instrument of propaganda.

In 2005, Pascal Bonnamour, the head of the European department of Reporters Without Borders, called the newly announced network "another step of the state to control information". In a 2005 interview with U.S. government-owned external broadcaster Voice of America, Russian-Israeli blogger Anton Nosik said the creation of RT "smacks of Soviet-style propaganda campaigns". In 2009, Luke Harding (then Moscow correspondent for The Guardian) described RT's advertising campaign in the United Kingdom as an "ambitious attempt to create a new post-Soviet global propaganda empire". In Russia, Andrey Illarionov, former advisor to Vladimir Putin, has called the channel "the best Russian propaganda machine targeted at the outside world". Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, speaking after the launch of RT America, said: "Russia Today is an extension of the methods and approach of the state-controlled media inside Russia, applied in a bid to influence the American cable audience".

Others have commended its promotion and discussion of issues ignored or just not given enough time by the mainstream news media. In E-International Relations, researcher Precious N Chatterje-Doody stated that RT viewers tend to recognize RT's state-controlled status, and that they choose to watch RT for its "non-mainstream" story selection and its use of technology. She asserted that if RT broadcast only "blatant propaganda", it would not retain its audience.

According to Adam Johnson in The Nation magazine, "while Russia Today toes the Kremlin's line on foreign policy, it also provides an outlet to marginalized issues and voices stateside. RT, for example, has covered the recent prison strikes—the largest in American history—twice. So far CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and Rutenberg's employer, The New York Times, haven't covered them at all. RT aggressively covered Occupy Wall Street early on while the rest of corporate US media were marginalizing from afar (for this effort, RT was nominated for an Emmy Award)." John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus says he appears on RT as well as the U.S.-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, commented "I've been given the opportunity to talk about military expenditures in a way I haven't been given in U.S. outlets". On the fairness issue, he said: "You're going to find blind spots in the coverage for any news organization".

Disinformation and conspiracy theories

Academics, fact-checkers, and news reporters (including some current and former RT reporters) have identified RT as a purveyor of disinformation and conspiracy theories.

In 2010, The Economist magazine observed that RT's programming, while sometimes interesting and unobjectionable, and sometimes "hard-edged", also presents "wild conspiracy theories" that can be regarded as "kooky".

A 2013 article in Der Spiegel said that RT "uses a chaotic mixture of conspiracy theories and crude propaganda", pointing to a program that "mutated" the Boston Marathon bombing into a U.S. government conspiracy.

The launch of RT UK was the subject of much comment in the British press in late 2014. In The Observer, Nick Cohen accused the channel of consciously spreading conspiracy theories and of being a "prostitution of journalism". Oliver Kamm, a columnist for The Times, called on British broadcasting regulator Ofcom to act against this "den of deceivers".

Journalists at The Daily Beast and The Washington Post have observed that RT employs Tony Gosling, an exponent of long-discredited conspiracy theories concerning the alleged control of the world by Illuminati and the Czarist antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

RT has broadcast stories about microchips being implanted into office workers in the EU to make them more "submissive"; about the "majority" of Europeans supporting Russian annexation of Crimea; the EU preparing "a form of genocide" against Russians; in Germany it falsely reported about a kidnapping of a Russian girl; that "NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe"; that Hillary Clinton fell ill; it has also on many occasions misrepresented or invented statements from European leaders.

In 2017, RT started its own fact-checking project, FakeCheck, in response to accusations of spreading fake news. The Poynter Institute conducted a content analysis of FakeCheck and concluded it "mixes some legitimate debunks with other scantily sourced or dubiously framed 'fact checks.'" Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab found that four out of nine articles published in its first two weeks contained "inaccuracies and possible bias with irrelevant or insufficient evidence."

Treatment of Putin and Medvedev

A 2007 article in The Christian Science Monitor stated that RT reported on the good job Putin was doing in the world and next to nothing on things like the conflict in Chechnya or the murder of government critics. According to a 2010 report by The Independent, RT journalists have said that coverage of sensitive issues in Russia is allowed, but direct criticism of Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev was not. Masha Karp wrote in Standpoint magazine that contemporary Russian issues "such as the suppression of free speech and peaceful demonstrations, or the economic inefficiency and corrupt judiciary, are either ignored or their significance played down". In 2008, Stephen Heyman wrote in The New York Times that in RT's Russia, "corruption is not quite a scourge but a symptom of a developing economy".

Anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism

The New Republic writer James Kirchick accused the network of "often virulent anti-Americanism, worshipful portrayal of Russian leaders". Edward Lucas wrote in The Economist (quoted in Al Jazeera English) that the core of RT was "anti-Westernism". Julia Ioffe wrote: "Often, it seemed that Russia Today was just a way to stick it to the U.S. from behind the façade of legitimate newsgathering." Shaun Walker wrote in The Independent that RT "has made a name for itself as a strident critic of US policy". Alessandra Stanley wrote in The New York Times that RT is "like the Voice of America, only with more money and a zesty anti-American slant". David Weigel writes that RT goes further than merely creating distrust of the United States government, to saying, in effect: "You can trust the Russians more than you can trust those bastards."

Russian studies professor Stephen F. Cohen stated in 2012 that RT does a lot of stories that "reflect badly" on the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and much of Western Europe and that they are "particularly aggrieved by American sermonizing abroad". Citing that RT compares stories about Russia allowing mass protests of the 2011–2012 Russian election protests with those of U.S. authorities nationwide arresting members of the Occupy movement. Cohen states that despite the pro-Kremlin slant, "any intelligent viewer can sort this out. I doubt that many idiots find their way to RT".

RT America has described journalists as "Russiagate conspiracy theorists" for covering Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Russian journalist, former press secretary of the head of the UN Mission in South Africa, Yuri Sigov, wrote that when covering Canada, Russia Today presents information selectively. This is almost always negative information aimed at fulfilling political orders.

Israeli–Palestinian conflict

RT, particularly the former RT presenter Abby Martin, has been accused of being anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian by The Algemeiner and Israel National News. Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman made a complaint to Putin at their official meeting in 2012.

Climate change denial

In November 2021, a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate described RT as being among "ten fringe publishers" that together were responsible for nearly 70 percent of Facebook user interactions with content that denied climate change. Facebook disputed the study's methodology.

COVID-19 misinformation

Compared to RT's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic for its viewers in Russia, RT's coverage of the pandemic for its international viewers was saturated with COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories. RT urged domestic Russian audiences to vaccinate and wear masks to prevent COVID-19, while advocating against virus-prevention measures on its English, German, French, Spanish, and Arabic-language platforms.

Responses

States

European Union – Sanctions against Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of Russia's state-controlled Rossiya Segodnya and RT television presenter, have been in place since the 2014 invasion and annexation of Ukraine's Crimea. The EU Council cites Kiselyov to be a "central figure of the government propaganda supporting the deployment of Russian forces in Ukraine". Initially, Russian state-owned media outlets were not banned and continued to be available in the EU, with the exception of Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. The European Parliament Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including Disinformation (INGE) described RT as "actively engaging in disinformation activities" and highlighted that RT and Sputnik are pushing local broadcasters in Europe off from the market thanks to massive funding from Russian Federation. Editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan was sanctioned by the European Union on 23 February 2022 when Russia recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. On 27 February 2022, the EU banned RT and Sputnik from broadcasting in its member countries, following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In July 2026, the EU clarified that the ban also applies to anyone sharing content from RT.

Australia – Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher requested the partially Australian government funded public service broadcaster SBS suspend broadcasts of RT and NTV news programming on its World Watch platform. Fletcher stated, "Given the current actions of the Russian government [2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine], and the lack of genuinely independent Russian media, this is a responsible decision." SBS suspended the aforementioned broadcasts on 25 February 2022. The RT channel was removed from Australian pay TV provider Foxtel's listings the next day due to concerns about the situation in Ukraine.

Canada – On 16 March 2022, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission banned RT and RT France from broadcasting in Canada.

Germany – After failing to obtain a broadcast license compliant with the State Media Treaty, RT DE was banned in Germany by the Commission for Licensing and Supervision (ZAK) on 2 February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded with "retaliatory measures" to remove German broadcaster Deutsche Welle from Russia.

Gibraltar – Chief Minister Fabian Picardo requested a nationwide ban of RT on 25 February 2022 in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, describing RT as "a dangerous source of disinformation that Gibraltar cannot accept on its networks". Television providers in Gibraltar agreed to suspend broadcasts of RT.

Political involvement

In April 2017, during his successful run for President of France, Emmanuel Macron's campaign team banned both RT and the Sputnik news agency from campaign events. A Macron spokesperson said the two outlets showed a "systematic desire to issue fake news and false information". Macron later said during a press conference that RT and Sputnik were "agencies of influence and propaganda, lying propaganda—no more, no less". RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan characterized Macron's remarks on RT as an attack on freedom of speech.

In October 2017, Twitter banned both RT and Sputnik from advertising on their social networking service amid accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, sparking an angry response from the Russian foreign ministry. Twitter in August 2020 began to identify RT, along with other Russian and Chinese media outlets, as "state-affiliated media" in a prominent place at the top of their accounts on the social media platform.

In November 2017, Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt announced that Google will be "deranking" stories from RT and Sputnik in response to allegations about election meddling by President Putin's government, provoking an accusation of censorship from both outlets.

In March 2018, John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor of the British Labour Party, advised fellow Labour MPs to boycott RT and said he would no longer appear on the channel. He said: "We tried to be fair with them and as long as they abide by journalistic standards that are objective that's fine but it looks as if they have gone beyond that line". A party representative said: "We are keeping the issue under review".

In July 2019, the UK Foreign Office banned both RT and Sputnik from attending the Global Conference for Media Freedom in London for "their active role in spreading disinformation". The Russian Embassy called the decision "direct politically motivated discrimination", while RT responded in a statement: "It takes a particular brand of hypocrisy to advocate for freedom of press while banning inconvenient voices and slandering alternative media."

Other responses

During the 2008 South Ossetia War, RT correspondent William Dunbar resigned after the network refused to let him report on Russian airstrikes of civilian targets, stating, "any issue where there is a Kremlin line, RT is sure to toe it". According to Variety, sources at RT confirmed that Dunbar had resigned, saying that it was not over bias. One senior RT journalist told the magazine, "the Russian coverage I have seen has been much better than much of the Western coverage... Russian news coverage is largely pro-Russia, but that is to be expected."

Shaun Walker, the Moscow correspondent for The Independent, said that RT had "instructed reporters not to report from Georgian villages within South Ossetia that had been ethnically cleansed". Julia Ioffe wrote that an RT journalist whose reporting deviated from "the Kremlin line that Georgians were slaughtering unarmed Ossetians" was reprimanded. Human Rights Watch said that RT's claim of 2,000 South Ossetian casualties was exaggerated.

In 2012, Jesse Zwick of The New Republic criticized RT, stating it held that "civilian casualties in Syria are minimal, foreign intervention would be disastrous, and any humanitarian appeals from Western nations are a thin veil for a NATO-backed move to isolate Iran, China, and Russia". He wrote that RT wants to "make the United States look out of line for lecturing Russia". Zwick also wrote that RT provided a "disproportionate amount of time" to covering libertarian Republican Ron Paul during his 2012 presidential campaign. Writing after her 2014 on-air resignation, Liz Wahl suggested the reason for this "wasn't his message of freedom and liberty but his non-interventionist stance and consistent criticism of U.S. foreign policy. His message fit RT's narrative that the United States is a huge bully." In a June 2011 broadcast of Adam vs. the Man, host Adam Kokesh endorsed fundraising for Paul, leading to a complaint to the Federal Election Commission charging a political contribution had been made by a foreign corporation. Kokesh said his cancellation in August was related to Paul's aide Jesse Benton rather than the complaint.

In September 2012, UK broadcast regulator Ofcom found that two Libyan dispatches broadcast by RT's Lizzie Phelan in a year earlier were in breach of its code on accuracy and impartiality. The following November, RT was again found in breach of impartiality rules in relation to its coverage of the Syrian conflict. An August 2013 story concerning unverified reports of the killing of 450 Kurdish civilians near the Turkey-Syria border was also found to have breached Ofcom's rules. That December, Ofcom found RT in breach of its standards in relation to the impartiality of a documentary entitled "Syrian Diary" broadcast the previous March. Speaking in 2014 former RT reporter Sara Firth said that there had previously been examples of senior editorial interference, and that she had been pulled out of Syria after some "very heated discussions" about the channel's coverage.

Awards and nominations

June 2007 – The 11th "Save and Preserve" International Environmental Television Festival awarded its Grand Prix to RT's Meeting with Nature series.

November 2007 – RT's report on the anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe received a special prize from the international 2007 AIB Media Excellence Awards

September 2008 – Russia's TEFI to Kevin Owen in Best News Anchor category

January 2009 – Silver World Medal from the New York Festivals, for Best News Documentary "A city of desolate mothers"

August 2010 – First nomination for an International Emmy Award in News category for its coverage of president Barack Obama's trip to Russia.

August 2012 – Second nomination for an International Emmy Award for its coverage of the international Occupy Wall Street movement.

May 2014 – Order "For Merit to the Fatherland" from President of Russia Vladimir Putin to editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan for coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War

August 2014 – Third nomination for an International Emmy Award for its coverage of the Guantanamo Bay hunger strikes.

August 2016 – Fourth nomination for an International Emmy Award for its coverage of the 70th anniversary session of the United Nations General Assembly.