In 2005 RT was hatched, as the
Columbia Journalism Review put it, as “a soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad, to counter the anti-Russian bias the Kremlin saw in the Western media.”
Reset button or no, we Americans are not the biggest fans of
Russian propaganda.
When RT first drew attention here, it was for its coverage of the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict, which portrayed the small republic of 4.6 million people as the aggressor. (One fairly typical segment
featured an interview with an American in South Ossetia who blamed America for the violence.) Its coverage of American politics was heavy on interviews with fringe experts and third party candidates; frequent on-air experts included
radio host Alex Jones and newsletter reporter Wayne Madsen, who’d discuss too-good-to-check stories about the origins of the
swine flu and why WTC Building 7 fell on 9/11.
