So here’s a partnership we might have seen coming: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will host a TV talk show that debuts in March on RT, the Kremlin-funded, English-language twenty-four-hour news channel.
The Kremlin created Russia Today (later shortened to just RT) in 2005, to counter what it believes is relentlessly negative western media coverage of Russia.
How does RT try to counteract that coverage? By providing relentlessly negative media coverage of the west—in particular, the United States. And by not biting the hand that finances it: the Kremlin. (For an analysis of RT and its coverage, done by Columbia Graduate School of Journalism students last spring, go here.)
RT staff were absolutely crowing today about the new Assange show, hyperbolically described on the channel’s website as “arguably the most anticipated news series of 2012.” According to RT, Assange will interview “iconoclasts, visionaries and power insiders,” though none of his interview subjects has been publicly identified.
RT noted that Assange will have to record his ten interviews while under house arrest; he is fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden, where he faces sexual assault allegations that he has denied.
From the perspective of the principal parties, this should be a win-win relationship. Assange had suddenly brought big international attention to a channel whose main star to date has been a snarky, twenty-something presenter, Alyona Minkovski, born in Russia but raised in California.
And RT gives Assange an international platform free from the filter of western mainstream media. RT wants controversy from him, as long as it doesn’t go against Kremlin interests.
“We are hoping it will be as explosive as WikiLeaks leaks,” gushed one RT announcer.
From the perspective of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Assange’s new show might seem an affirmation of her lament to Congress last year, that “We are in an information war, and we are losing it.”
Clinton ticked off the names of some of the best-known government-funded satellite news channels created in the past decade: RT, Al Jazeera English, China’s CCTV. They are, she told Congress, “literally changing people’s minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, I think it’s really effective.”
Though it’s not clear how many minds and attitudes are really changed by RT and other services, Clinton’s “information war” description does seem apt. To learn more about the global media wars among satellite stations, and to see how several of them stack up journalistically, go to this report by the Columbia Journalism School’s International Newsroom class last May.
Huh, never heard of Russia Today but I will have to watch it when Julian gets his own show.
#1 Posted by Tyke, CJR on Thu 26 Jan 2012 at 06:22 PM
Nice to see you countering the Russian impression that all Western journalism covering Russia is anti-Russian biased with this anti-Russian biased piece of journalism covering Russia.
I've watched dozen of hours of RT, and it is no more biased in favor of the hand that feeds it than most any media outlet in the US. More importantly, it's biases are transparent, unlike so much of the Western media. It is certainly not "relentlessly negative" in its coverage of the West. That is simply a lie, a transparent and easily provable lie, and one that clearly demonstrates your bias.
In an international media market which is dominated by Western and mostly US interests and biases, RT fills an important niche. Anyone who wants to have a well-rounded view of what is happening on the planet should watch a least a couple hours each month.
#2 Posted by disputo, CJR on Thu 26 Jan 2012 at 09:07 PM
Well, another tutt tutt blockbuster analysis from CJR. Where would we be without you? What you don't seem to grasp is that Julian Assange (all laid out in Hastings interview in current issue of Rolling Stone) has actually exposed your cherished "media" for the complicit, compromised, impotent, organ that it is. It's quite natural that you can't stand him. Why would anybody want to read your watery "reports" to understand the first thing about truth or media when all they have to do is watch (as opposed to turn a blind eye) to what Assange has done. Any time a journalist actually uncovers a hidden and important REALITY you chime in with your resentful and out-dated objections. He's changed the entire field, your entire "game." At least Hillary is smart enough to grasp what has happened.
#3 Posted by Celia Farber, CJR on Fri 27 Jan 2012 at 01:29 AM
CJR sure shows its bias in this article - and a poor understanding of the propaganda model of journalism.
The US media is subtly constrained by its corporate owners. For "Kremlin" read "dollar". As Prof Mark Crispin Miller says: "Americans drift in a sea of propaganda". Shocking that the CJR comes across as naive about this.
Assange has exposed the limitations of corporate journalists and they don't like it one bit. But he deserves a Nobel Prize for jacking open the doors of democratic discourse and transparency.
#4 Posted by media consumer, CJR on Fri 27 Jan 2012 at 05:18 AM
So the supposed advocate of information transparency has gone to work for people who murder journalists.
#5 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Fri 27 Jan 2012 at 03:48 PM
Thanks, CJR.
After reading Ms. Cooper's blog entry, I am inspired to watch even more RT than I already do.
RT ftw!
#6 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 1 Feb 2012 at 08:42 AM