Fox News is state media

Let’s drop the pretense.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Let’s talk a little about Russia’s state-owned English-language TV network, RT, or Russia Today, as it was originally known.

It was started in 2005 by a multinational team of journalists — I happen to personally know a British producer who helped get it up and running. He and others had high hopes that it could be a kind of independent media outlet in Russia, which jails, disappears and kills such journalists. In fact, Svetlana Mironyuk, the head of RIA Novosti, a state-owned news agency at the time, told Australian newspaper The Age that year: “Unfortunately, at the level of mass consciousness in the West, Russia is associated with three words: communism, snow and poverty. We would like to present a more complete picture of life in our country.”

Now, few were fooled that this new outlet would fairly report on infrastructure failures, corrupt politicians or Putin’s shenanigans, but, at least at the beginning, there was a little hope of some independence. Still, RT was slated to draw much of its news from state news agency RIA Novosti.

Looking back, despite any wishful thinking, RT was clearly never going to be a news outlet that was independent from the government.

“Russia Today was conceived as a soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad, to counter the anti-Russian bias the Kremlin saw in the Western media,” Julia Ioffe wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2010. “Since its founding in 2005, however, the broadcast outlet has become better known as an extension of former President Vladimir Putin’s confrontational foreign policy.”

What I find insidious about RT is that whenever I’ve watched it (while abroad), it comes across as an outlet that covers feel-good stories and politics — “unbiased” of course. It does the heavy work of making itself appear nonpartisan. At the same time, its bombasts would hold their own against any of the world’s best. Hmmm, who does that remind me of…?

More from Ioffe: “Too often the channel was provocative just for the sake of being provocative. It featured fringe-dwelling ‘experts,’ like the Russian historian who predicted the imminent dissolution of the United States; broadcast bombastic speeches by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez; aired ads conflating Barack Obama with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and ran out-of-nowhere reports on the homeless in America. Often, it seemed that Russia Today was just a way to stick it to the U.S. from behind the façade of legitimate newsgathering.”

Outlets like CNN and MSNBC have poisoned the line between their own news and opinion; what results is like a martini with a gross amount of salty olive juice when you asked for it dry. You’ll ingest it because it’s there, but you may not like it.

Oh! I know! It reminds me of Fox News, the channel that reports at the behest of certain politicians and their points of views.

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RT’s political history is a good primer on how deceptive state media can be — not to mention how hopeful, we, as consumers of media, can be. What’s hard to see, however, is that despots don’t want us to think we’re watching a version of the news they feed to the media. They want what they say to be the news.

In American, we like to think we have independent journalism. It’s not called the Fourth Estate for no reason.

And at least in America, we still do. But it’s under threat. Like, serious, I-can’t-sleep-at-night threat.