The World According to Russia Today

Description
Reviews
Citation
Cataloging
Transcript

In 2014, Malaysian Airlines passenger flight 17 was shot down with a rocket intended for the private plane of Russian president Vladimir Putin... If, that is, a viewer is relying on the satellite TV network Russia Today as their source for news.

These claims were not the first time Russia Today drew attention for counter-factual reporting: during the 2008 war in Georgia, the network reported that South Ossetians were the victims of genocide at the hands of Georgians. In 2014, the channel was warned by the British TV agency for its biased and inaccurate reporting on the uprising on Maidan Square in Kiev. The list goes on and on.

Russia Today (now renamed just RT) was launched in 2005 to bring a Russian-centric perspective on current political events to a global audience. After a decade of generous Kremlin funding, 2015 found the 24-hour news channel the biggest media organization on YouTube with 2 billion viewers: more than CNN and the BBC combined.

The network claims only to offer an alternative perspective to the monolithic view presented by mainstream Western media. But what kind of 'reporting' is Russia Today actually doing? What is it like to work for the channel? How much influence does the Kremlin really have there? Is it possible to differentiate between fact and opinion on a Russian channel when the Russian interests are at stake?

In Misja Pekel's disturbing documentary THE WORLD ACCORDING TO RUSSIA TODAY, former and current news anchors, editors and correspondents for the network-including William Dunbar, Sara Firth, Marc de Jersey, Afshin Rattansi and Liz Wahl-join journalists and media professionals Alexander Nekrassov, Peter Pomerantsev, Richard Sambrook, Daniel Sandford, Derk Sauer and more in a detailed dissection of the channel's modus operandi and the challenges and dangers of reporting and consuming news in a globalized world.

Citation

Select a citation style:

Main credits

Pekel, Misja (film director)
Somer, Madeleine (film producer)
Fransen, Iris (film producer)
Mastin, Dawn (narrator)

Other credits

Directors of photography, Pierre Rezus, Remco Bikkers; editor, Floor Rodenburg.

MARC Record See Worldcat record

Keywords

the world; world; according to; russia today; rt; misja pekel; georgia; report; truth; russia; ussr; kremlin; news; media; propaganda; fox; cnn; bbc; slander; libel; documentary; film; dvd; movie; video; ; "The World According to Russia Today"; Icarus Films

TIJDCODE	WIE/WAT	TEKST
00.02.04	[caption]	ARGOS
00.02.10	Voice-over	Media coverage of the MH17 crash in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 led to a battle between Russian and Western media outlets.
00.02.18	News fragment	“The lack of credible facts, has it prevented many in the west from jumping to conclusions? A buke missile, widely believed to have been fired by pro-Russian rebels...”
	News Fragment	“Common sense says the Ukrainians did it.”
	[caption]	RT Presents
00.02.32	voice-over	Russia Today presented the Russian perspective of events. The channel is financed by the Russian government. And broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in English, Spanish, Arabic and as of late in German as well.
00.02.48	Presenter	“Hello and herzlich wilkommen zu unsere aller aller aller ersten Zendung…“
	Voice-over	The channel’s coverage often stirs controversy.
00.02.56	John Kerry	“Russia Today’s network has deployed to promote president Putin’s phantasy about what is playing out on the ground.”
00.03.05	Journalist	It’s a great privilege as a journalist to be working for an organisation that John Kerry calls a propaganda bullhorn.
	Woman	MH17 is the last in a very long line of incidents with RT, it was, it was just the final point. And I snapped.
00.03.22	voice-over	The world according to Russia Today. Is that just the news from a Russian perspective? Or Kremlin propaganda?
	Newsreader	“And that is why personally I cannot be part of Network funded by the Russian government”.
00.03.35	[caption]	The world according to Russia Today
	[caption]	Mark Rutte, prime minister of the Netherlands
	Rutte	“We want to get to the bottom of this. And if it becomes clear that this was an attack…”
	[caption]	July 18, 2014
	Rutte	“I will personally make every effort to ensure that the perpetrators are found and punished.”
00.03.57	voice-over	While the Netherlands lead a criminal investigation into the disaster, media worldwide speculate on how the plane may have crashed. Russia Today included. The channel presents various theories on what may have happened.
00.04.11	[caption] Newsreader	Russia Today July 21, 2014; source rt.com “As we will start with breaking news, another jet was detected at the same time and place of the Malaysian plane crash in eastern Ukraine and had the characteristics of a military aircraft. That is what Russia’s defence minister revealed less than an hour ago.”
00.04.25	[caption] Newsreader	Russia Today July 17, 2014 “Russia’s Interfax News agency is quoting a source in the Russian aviation industry, claiming president Putin’s plane may have actually been the target of the attack. It is claimed that the president’s jet crossed paths over Warsaw at the exact same height as the doomed Boeing, now just 40 minutes later.”
00.04.43	[caption] man	Russia Today July 23, 2014 “Most likely, and I’m not an expert here, I’m gonna wait for the investigation, but it seems to me common sense says the Ukrainians did it.”
00.04.52	[caption] Sandford	Daniel Sandford, correspondent BBC News It seemed to us that the Russian media were very quickly making sure that there were alternative theories for how this plane had been destroyed, other than the one that was very quickly coming out of western capitals, out of London and out of Washington and out of Australia too,
00.05.11		that the plane had been shot down by buk missile launching controlled by the rebels.
00.05.18	[caption] Sandford	BBC News July 18, 2014 “It’s a tragic and devastating scene, people’s clothes and belongings and their lifejackets are scattered amongst the charred bodies. You can still smell the death and the burning in the air. But it’s gonna be…”
00.05.33	voice-over	BBC correspondent Daniel Sandford is one of the first journalists at the crash site. He is astonished by the Russian coverage.
00.05.42	Sandford	You normally expect, which is a sort of coming together or a theory about what might have happened. In fact what you were getting is multiple alternative theories. Well, there might have been a Ukrainian jet hiding behind the airliner, there might have been a Ukrainian jet that shot down the airliner, they might have been trying to, the Ukrainians might have been trying to shoot Putin’s plane but actually they shot a civilian plane instead.
00.06.05	voice-over	Former head of the BBC World Service, Richard Sambrook reviews the footage aired by Russia Today just hours after the crash.
00.06.14	[caption] Reporter	Russia Today July 17, 2014 “Let’s see, can we hear from another person who was near the scene on the Russian Ukraine border when this plane came down.”
00.06.23	Voice	“According to preliminary information coming from militias, the aircraft was brought down by a missile, presumably coming from the positions of the Ukrainian military. This information will be verified. It could be that the aircraft was shut down by Ukrainian air defences.”
00.06.48		“I saw a Malaysian passport myself just now.”
	[caption] Sambrook	Richard Sambrook, former head BBC World Service Here you have what pretends to be an eye witness, there’s no sense of who this individual is, is it a Russia Today journalist, and not introduce as that. They introduce somebody on the ground.
00.07.03		And it mixes eye witness evidence of seeing the wreckage and the bodies and the passports and suddenly inserts this line that you know military reports say it must have come from the Ukrainian army.
00.07.17	Sandford	All the shooting down of planes that had happened that far, had been Ukrainian planes shot down by the rebels. So if anything like that had come to me, my immediate question would be, wow I didn’t realise the Ukrainians were in the business of using air defences at the moment.
00.07.35		So, yeah that, I wouldn’t have aired that, put it that way, without a lot of checking.
00.07.41	Sambrook	When you see a report that mixes unsupported assertions in the middle of factual reporting, then it just increases that suspicion that it’s a deliberate misinformation.
00.07.53	voice-over	Afshin Rattansi is a British presenter at RT UK, Russia Today’s dedicate UK channel. He is the only Russia Today employee willing to talk to us. Headquarters in Moscow have denied four of our interview requests.
00.08.12	[caption] Rattansi	Afshin Rattansi, presenter RT UK RT’s coverage of the MH17 immediately it started to give different theories while reporting the western certainty, seeming certainty here that this was Vladimir Putin who knows with a rocked propelled mis… gun, himself in his own hands, shooting down a plane and killing hundreds of people.
00.08.31	voice-over	Boris Jeltsin’s former spin doctor Alexander Nekrassov reviews the media coverage with us too. He now works as a journalist and commentator for a range of different media outlets, including Russia Today.
00.08.44	[caption] Nekrassov	Alexander Nekrassov, former Kremlin advisor Before the plane even crashed on the ground, all the newspapers in the west accused Russia. At once. Now, first of all, as a proper reporter and I taught a lot of journalists, young journalists, you don’t do things like that.
00.09.00	[caption] reporter	Russia Today July 18, 2014 “The lack of credible facts, has it prevented many in the west from jumping to conclusions? According to The Sun newspaper the Russian president is personally responsible for downing the Malaysian Airlines plane in Ukraine.”
00.09.14	Nekrassov	Russia Today had a role to play. Russia Today has to counter sort of work as a counter act against some of the western propaganda, because unfortunately this propaganda that we’re hearing and by the way now they found the pilot who shot down the plane.
00.09.35		And they even know his name: Voloshin. And he will now confess to what happened.
	[caption] Newsreader	Russia Today December 23, 2014 “This witness, this alleged witness, he says that he works at a Ukrainian airfield from which military jets flew sorties in the east of the country.”
	[caption] Newsreader	Russia Today December 23, 2014 “The witness told us that the pilot, whose name is captain Voloshin, was shocked, confused and in a state of mind he defined the passenger jet as an operational target.”
00.09.59	[caption] Sandford	Daniel Sandford, correspondent BBC News One of the things that was suggested strongly to us, that there could potentially be some rebel involvement in the shooting down of MH17, was the fact that very quickly the Russian propaganda machine was in action suggesting lots of other alternatives.
00.10.16		And it’s almost like the more they said it wasn’t them, the more we thought it might be.
	voice-over	Marc de Jersey was one of the first journalists to join Russia Today and was closely involved in developing the channel. It now has a potential audience of 700 million. With over a billion views, it is the world’s largest news organisation on YouTube, but RT started out much smaller.
00.10.43		In 2005 with a modest allowance from the government.
	[caption] Jersey	Marc de Jersey, former Russia Today journalist The music that brings back the most memories. I didn’t do that very well, but that became the kind of six months, that’s what I heard, you know every 15minutes of every hour of every 8 hours we were on air.
00.11.05	voice-over	For years, Derk Sauer owned the independent media, Russia’s largest publishing house. He witnessed Russia Today’s growth from close quarters.
00.11.16	Sauer	The Russian government launches a new TV channel so you expect to see a bunch of men in ill-fitting suits.
	[caption] Sauer	Derk Sauer, media entrepreneur in Russia That’s what you expect. But they were smart and did the exact opposite.
00.11.32	[caption] Judah	Ben Judah, Kremlin expert I think one of the key drivers behind Russia Today is Margarita Simonyan who as a very young woman when she was appointed to head Russia Today, she is one of the smartest media executives we have in our generation.
00.11.49	[caption] Simonyan	September 15, 2005 “One of the main demands of professional news production is to be objective, is to keep the balance which is I think absolutely obvious for everyone.”
	Judah	One of her key insights, it was that every single one of the news channels internationally looked the same. And her instant observation was that Russia Today had to be different.
00.12.08		So Russia Today, it was decided, had to be green. Because all other channels are blue or red. Russia Today had to have camera angles that moved in and out, because other TV stations had camera angles that only panned from the side. Russia Today had to have stories that there was a demand for, but people were ignoring.
00.12.26		Every time tests were run to see what people were liking or enjoying. If there was something popular, more space was given for it.
	[caption]	RT Russia Today
00.12.36	[caption] Sambrook	Richard Sambrook, former head BBC World Service Simonyan came to visit me with a colleague who I think was a Russian official, government official, to say that they wanted to launch Russia Today within six months. I expressed my scepticism to them. But I have to say they did it.
00.12.51		And I think that’s perhaps a mark of the level of investment, and of state backing that they had to cut through any bureaucracy or any hurdles that there were in order to get it launched on time.
00.13.04	Judah	The Kremlin felt from the perspective of Russia that it was drowning in western TV, western ideas, western agenda, western NGO’s and that the Russian public had been watching or listening 30 or 40 years, even during the period of the Berlin wall, to western media.
00.13.24		And that western media was able to define the story and set the narrative.
	Sandford	The Kremlin feels that the western media have had too much control over the international agenda and they want to change that.
00.13.37	Judah	RT comes out of the obsession of TV and RT comes out of the desire to push more dominance of TV into international water.
00.13.49	voice-over	British Russian filmmaker and media expert Peter Pomerantsev grew up in England. But he as worked in the Russian TV industry for years.
00.13.59	Pomerantsev	When it first launched I was in Moscow and very much the pitch to western journalists who were there hiring,
00.14.05	[caption]	Peter Pomerantsev, expert Russian media
	Pomerantsev	was the kind of show that Russia was becoming democratic. I mean the Russian TV could be more democratic than Russian channels. A lot of Russian journalists I knew wanted to work for Russia Today because they thought it would be, give them more freedom than they would have at the Russian channels, the Russian language channels.
00.14.20	Jersey	And I think I might have said ,well listen, you know, Vladimir Putin doesn’t have a good track record with journalism within this country. And they said well no this is an effort, you know, to introduce them kind of, as, as I was told emphaticly. And that Margarita is on record in press conferences,
00.14.35		it was actually quite clever, she said, listen we’ve hired guys from ABC News, Sky News, BBC News, you know this will not be a propaganda channel.
00.14.44	[caption] Simonyan	Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief Russia Today “Censorship from the government in this country is prohibited by constitution. Like in yours.”
	Sauer	The BBC is also funded by the British government but they have protocols and rules. And they have a tradition. The big problem with Russia is that there’s no tradition. The tradition over there is: who pays, decides.
00.15.06		So if you know that the Kremlin pays the bill, then you know you have to take that into account.
00.15.17	Jersey	But it was always gonna be the case with [Chets news?] trying for separatism etcetera, etcetera, well and these kind of eastern bloc states you know possibly breaking off, it seemed editorially obvious that that was gonna be the test for RT, getting fair and balanced coverage with their stories with a, with a kind of autocratic president who likes to control the media.
00.15.41	voice-over	And that test came when war broke out in Georgia. For many years there had been tensions between the Georgian government and South Assetia and Abkhazia. Two renegade republics with a high percentage of ethnic Russians. In August 2008 these tensions led to an armed confrontation. Shortly thereafter Russia took military action.
00.16.05	voice-over	William Dunbar was Russia Today’s correspondent in Georgia at the time. During a live broadcast, he mentioned unconfirmed reports of Russian fighter jets bombing apartment blocks in the Georgian town of Gori.
00.16.21	[caption] Dunbar	William Dunbar, former Russia Today correspondent And then I get a call from my producer, who goes: did you say something about Gori being bombed? And I go, oh yeah I said there were unconfirmed reports of, of Gori being bombed. He said well they’re not very happy about that. What do you mean they’re not very happy about that? And she goes, well they don’t want you to talk about that.
00.16.38		And we have this discussion, I go into the office to see her and I think I say, and by this time, by the time I’ve reached her office, we have the footage, like Reuters have the footage, APTV, APTN have the footage of, sure enough, Russian planes bombing Gori, hitting apartment blocks with I think twelve civilian casualties, maybe more.
00.16.58		Ahm, and it’s real. There’s the proof.
	[caption] Dunbar	Russia Tody August 4, 2008 “…repeat airstrikes by Russian warplanes particularly in a town just outside of Tbilisi , the capital, a town called Gori.”
	Newsreader	“But this is Gori today, a ghost town where Stalin’s statue ironically towers over the main square. Yes, there is glass on the ground and damaged cars. But look at these pictures and judge for yourself.”
00.17.24	voice-over	That night, Russia Today’s editors called on William Dunbar again. He was asked to debunk a faulty CNN report. The American news channel had wrongly announced that the Georgian capital of Tbilisi had been bombed.
00.17.41	Dunbar	And they go: well we want you to say that Tbilisi is not being bombed, it’s not being bombed, is, well no it isn’t being bombed. Well great, that’s what we want. Ahm I go well ok, I want you to know that, and at that time we’d just had news that two other civilian towns, other than Gori were bombed also with multiple civilian casualties in both Poti and in Zugdidi in the west of Georgia.
00.18.01		Ahm, and ah I, well I want you to, I’m gonna mention I want you to know I’m gonna mention, when I debunk this CNN account I’m also gonna mention that there are confirmed reports of Poti and Zugdidi being bombed with civilian casualties.
00.18.15		And they said well in that case we don’t want the phone on, and I said in that case I’m afraid I no longer work for you. And that was that.
	[caption] Pomerantsev	Peter Pomerantsev, expert Russian media A sort of big transformation seemed to happen during the war of Georgia. Before that, Russia didn’t quite sort of you know, quite boring and conservative and not particularly scandalous.
00.18.30		And suddenly the war of Georgia they seemed to finally understand why they were created for. And I think that’s the first time people sat up and noticed them. Because you know during the war in Georgia they’d have like a, a running line saying, genocide by the Georgians.
00.18.44	Dunbar	Genocide in huge letters, because you know, some separatist official claimed that there was a genocide. [Labro] said that there was you know 1500 dead civilians killed by Georgian troops, of course none of this turned out to be true. It all, it turned out that there was only a few hundred civilians, most of whom were Georgian civilians who were killed during the war rather than these thousands, there was certainly no genocide.
00.19.05	[caption] Presenter	Russia Today August 11, 2008 “He defended the description of what’s happening in the region as genocide. He said that out of 100.000 people, 2000 killed, 30.000 refugees. He said, that’s enough. What do you think of that?”
	Man	“Well I think he made it very clear…”
00.19.21	Dunbar	This is exactly why I had to resign. Can you imagine, I mean if I would have stayed, they would have been asking me to use the word genocide I guess? Or to report on the potential genocide or, I don’t know.
00.19.33	[caption] Nekrassov	Alexander Nekrassov, former Kremlin advisor They need to check it, I suppose they did. But again, this is a war situation. So you want in this whole conflict situation out of the blue, people to think very carefully and, I mean, on that particular situation. And I don’t know. I don’t know. I took abuse with you, I don’t know what to answer on that particular subject.
00.19.54	[caption] Rattansi	Afshin Rattansi, presenter RT UK I’m not aware of that particular broadcast I would say. Cause RT was just beginning around that time, as far as I understand.
00.20.01	Dunbar	I really think that’s when the cards were placed on the table, that Russia Today is not really about news, it’s about presenting how the Kremlin wants you to view this news event.
00.20.14	voice-over	Shortly after William Dunbar resigned in 2008, Sara Firth started her career with Russia Today.
	Firth	I knew a little bit about the controversy already, around RT. That there was one story that had always, already been run from someone who resigned.
	[caption] Firth	Sara Firth, former Russia Today reporter Talking about their time in Georgia. So it was out there. There was already information. But honestly I was so excited to get back to Russia, that it didn’t, it didn’t even really factor in, into my decision making process.
00.20.48		There was no doubt that I was gonna take the job.
	[caption] Judah	Ben Judah, Kremlin expert The directors of Russia Today look at other western media and they see disarray, they see collapsing news agencies, they see no pay, they see no stable jobs.
00.20.59		They see a generation of young journalists in Britain and America who are embittered at not having any stable jobs and they can prey on them very easily.
00.21.12	Firth	I got the e-mail one day, I opened up my computer, there was an e-mail with a contract from RT. And I thought I’d won the lottery, when I did the currency conversion on what they were offering I was sort of, it was mind blowing.
00.21.29	voice-over	In 2010, Russia Today decided to expand. After creating both an Arabic and a Spanish channel, they turned their attention to the American market . The channel presents itself as an alternative to western mainstream news.
00.21.46	[caption] Presenter	Russia Today January 14, 2010 “It’s the reason why we, here at RT TV America, are taking on that responsibility of covering stories, not told by the mainstream media.”
00.21.59	voice-over	Liz Wahl started working at RT America’s bureau in Washington DC in 2011. She quickly became one of the channel’s anchors.
00.22.13	[caption] Presenter	Russia Today May 24, 2012 “It’s Thursday May 24^th, 8 PM here in Washington DC. I’m Liz Wahl and you’re watching RT.”
	voice-over	By then Russia Today was the second most watched foreign news channel in America, surpassed only by BBC World.
00.22.29	[caption] Wahl	Liz Wahl, former Russia Today anchor And I asked them about journalistic independence, and they assured me that, that this was not a propaganda station. That yeah, we are, we do try to do different stories but we try to, they really hammered home that this is an opportunity to cover stories that the mainstream media ignores.
00.22.48	[caption] Rattansi	Afshin Rattansi, presenter RT UK RT is running a counter narrative and its tagline is question more. So luckily in a time when corporate and state mandated media is so uniform, its actually quite easy.
00.23.02	[caption] Pomerantsev	Peter Pomerantsev, expert Russian media This is the pitch they’re taking. Again, I think they see that this trend exists in the west. They see that there’s a sort of ready, an utterly home grown campaign against mainstream , a philosophical one, this idea of the other, this idea of the alternative always being good. And they’re just trying to tap into that.
00.23.19	Firth	And you’d meet colleagues who were hypocritical of RT. I used to find it a bit strange that you think, do you think I wake up in the morning and think oh, I’m gonna go and be a propagandist today. How can I manipulate the news. No, of course you’re not doing that.
00.23.33		I fully believed in reporting alternative stories.
	[caption]	Russia Today June 15, 2011
	Firth	‘’The clashes between the policer and the protesters are still going on, you can see just up here, you can…”
00.23.46	Firth	[Braser] was the first big story that I had, and we got caught in the middle of one of the riots.
	Firth	“...the protesters, just at the moment…”
	Firth	And RT just put all the footage up. So I actually had a colleague at RT phone me and he’s saying Sara, you might want to have a look at what they’ve put online.
00.24.11	Firth	“… look, look, [?] literally going up right now as we speak, you an see that on the road… you can see going off as we see the processing and the police are still [?] at the moment. Very [hurt] that we are here, [?alloathing] people who are provoking and they didn’t even want us to go ahead, so you can’t see…”
00.24.29	Firth	And they were so happy because this clip become viral and it was getting loads of hits online. Ahm, so I felt great. I was , you know I‘d done well and the channel were thrilled with it.
00.24.46	Firth	They gave these young journalists like myself a camera crew and a travel budget that was insane, go and do the story however you best do, you should do it. There were no rules. And it was just with a couple of conversations I had with other journalists about that, where they said, you know just be careful because if you’ve done that at our channel, it wouldn’t perhaps be looked on in the same way..
00.25.11		That was the first time I think I became aware of the fact, it’s on me. It’s my choice how save I am on this stool because there’s not that infrastructure at RT. And actually moving forward that as often the stuff that was encouraged. They, they wanted you to be in the centre of the action.
00.25.27	[caption] Sauer	Derk Sauer, media entrepreneur in Russia The hosts, who are often foreign: English, American et cetera, are all young, eager, well-paid and very ambitious. But they’re not journalistic heavyweights.
00.25.47		All journalistic decisions are made by Russians.
	Wahl	The majority of the employees at RT America, at least here in the DC bureau, are Americans. But it’s run by Russians.
00.26.00	Firth	And we used to joke in the newsroom that you kind of felt like RT was hate preaching, because you’d have an hour’s rundown where it would be you know, we hate Europe, we hate Georgia, we hate America and then it story right at the end would be like: and look at this wonderful Russian event.
00.26.17	Wahl	Even if it’s an important story, if it didn’t make the US or the, or a western country look bad enough, if I didn’t hammer home a certain angle enough, well then the news story wasn’t really serving its purpose.
00.26.32	Firth	This is the daily battle at RT. You would be fighting over a sentence and that would be the difference between you finishing work you know after 6 hours or finishing work after 18 you know, it was really that ridiculous.
00.26.47	Wahl	You just don’t criticise Russia, you just don’t go there. There is an un.. almost like an unspoken rule. You just know you’re not supposed to suggest that story.
00.26.58	Rattansi	I don’t recognise any of that, it doesn’t banter in the news. All the banter in the newsroom I remember, and still we have that banter, is get the story, that’s too mainstream, find an angle which helps those not in power. The phrases I hear in the RT UK newsroom are think about true telling, to the powerful.
00.27.21		Or the truth of what’s happening to the powerless. Not: let’s do the Kremlin’s bidding on foreign policy. And it’s a great shame that these claims are used to stereotype our newsroom.
00.27.33	Wahl	The way that they encourage us to write some of our scripts is that, look at the other news stations, they’re covering, they’re not even paying attention to this, they’re not even covering this. Almost as if it’s some sort of conspiracy that the mainstream media, the corporate media, they are part of the military industrial complex.
00.27.53		They work hand in hand with the US government.
	Pomerantsev	In Russian information psychological war theory, everything at all times is an information psychological war. It’s like a, it’s more like a slightly Trotskyist vision of the world, where the world involved in information war all the time.
00.28.10		So, CNN, BBC are naturally tools of the CIA that are being used to attack Russia. We have to attack back and the main way we attack is by disorganising the enemy.
00.28.20	Presenter	“The media coverage in the west has been largely slanted against Russia.”
	Presenter	“You know the corporate media distracts us from what you and I should care about, because they are a profit driven industry that sells us sensationalistic garbage and calls it breaking news.”
00.28.35	newsreader	“Western media present their damning cries as the voice of the whole world’s outrage, investigative journalist [Audrian Salboot], she says the press is trying to protect the interests of Europe and the US.”
00.28.45	Pomerantsev	I think the aim is to show that everyone is biased, everyone is faulty, everyone is lying, everyone is propaganda. And thus, you know, spreading this lack of belief in everything. Once you have that kind of wasteland, then you know you can spin anything you want into it.
00.29.00	voice-over	Russia Today again presented its own interpretation of events at the end of 2023, when protests broke out on Maidan Square in Kiev and tensions escalated in Crimea.
00.29.12	[caption] presenter	Russia Today, March 4, 2014 “This is the Crimea. There are two roads connecting the peninsula to the mainland. Here and here. This is one of them. Two roads that locals say could become two gateways for undesirable forces from the north.”
00.29.25	Presenter	“They fear that Ukrainian fascists pose a major threat. The country’s ultranationalist right sector group helps topple president Janoekovitsj. Now many Crimeans are worried that such radicals want to come and open Pandora’s box.”
00.29.40	[caption] Wahl	Liz Wahl, former Russia Today anchor Ukraine. It was the first time that the questions were very much, that were fed to me. Verbatim. Word for word, we want you to touch upon this. We want you to ask about the neo Nazis in, in the opposition. We want you to point out the hypocrisy of the west and the US in invading other countries in the past.
00.30.05		We don’t want you to use the word invasion, because we don’t want this to look like an invasion.
	[caption] Firth	Sara Firth, former Russia Today reporter The Ukrainian stories we were running about fascist elements amongst the protesters, there was no context in that, at no point did RT say, that actually this is the figure, this is the sort of percentage of people that we have this problem with and here’s the bigger story behind it.
00.30.28		So you hone in on this tiny bit and the story becomes something completely different.
	Presenter	“The threat of neo-Nazi ideology is causing alarm in the Ukraine.”
	Presenter	“That’s stoking fears of a rise in neo-Nazi ism.”
	Presenter	“Labour has always supported selling killing machines to dictators, but its present leader appeared to argue for exports to the neo-Nazis of Kiev.”
00.30.49	[caption] Rattansi	Afshin Rattansi, presenter RT UK RT, I think we’d have to ask my editor why we couldn’t afford a full scale polling organisation commission for me down the square to work out how many Nazis or people with Nazi sympathies were involved in the coup d’état.
00.31.05	[caption] Judah	Ben Judah, Kremlin expert Calling the enemy fascists, Nazis and [bandedevtsji] which is the word of the kind of gangs and partisans that were sometimes fighting with Hitler and sometimes fighting against him from the Ukrainian side, is to make people emotional.
00.31.18	[caption] Nekrassov	Alexander Nekrassov, former Kremlin advisor Are they sort of picking up the phone and telling the head of the channel, of first national channel or second national channel or RT, I want you to write this down? No they don’t do. No they don’t.
00.31.33	Rattansi	IT is interesting, cause I met some old colleagues at the BBC recently and they actually believed that I was phoned by the Kremlin before we do our show, going underground. And I presumed they were joking and then I realised, no they actually believe that the Kremlin phones me up when we make the show.
00.31.53		I mean, this is just patent nonsense.
	Judah	When you’re working in a [foretarian] state in the media propaganda channels in a [foretarian] state, there is a sort of e-mail coming in every morning going we say this, we don’t say this. People are paid high salaries, and its mostly self-censorship. You’re kind of guessing what they don’t want you to say.
00.32.13	Wahl	There was self-censorship there. You were expected to self-censor. And it was, they were, they didn’t tell you explicitly you must self-censor. But you learned that that’s something that you have to do in order to get by there, to not, to not clash with the news director, to not clash with management.
00.32.30	Judah	You can’t progress unless you guess right. You can’t get a promotion unless you guess right. You can’t advance much further, it’s that how it works more or less. So most western journalists working there put themselves in this mind-set where they are thinking towards Putin.
00.32.30	[caption] Pomerantsev	Peter Pomerantsev, expert Russian media RT at the end of the day only has one viewer, Putin. They have to convince Putin that the model they’ve chosen is the right model.
00.32.57	voice-over	In April 204 when it was unclear whether Russian soldiers were operating in then Ukrainian controlled Crimea, the underlying ties between the Russian media and the Kremlin became clearly visible.
00.33.10	[caption] Presenter	Russia Today March 13, 2014 “When I travelled to Crimea, I expected to find what I saw on TV back home. Images of the mighty Russian military storming into Ukraine. I confess, I did see one Russian tank with my own eyes. But this battle machine has been here since the 1940s and not going anywhere ever since.”
00.33.30	[caption] Wahl	Liz Wahl, former Russia Today anchor Come on, really? I mean there’s probably an element of truth there that there was an old rusty tank but there’s other ones elsewhere. I mean, that’s not the whole story.
00.33.43	[caption] Sandford	Daniel Sandford, correspondent BBC News Several weeks after the annexation of Crimea, then president Putin did say in a speech in the Kremlin that yes indeed there had been Russian troops in Crimea and they’d done a very good job. So, the Kremlin’s position and the position of all the Russian media until that point was completely undermined by the fact that he had then admitted what had happened.
00.34.05	[caption] Voice interpreter	Russia Today April 17, 2014 “We had to take measures to prevent the situation from developing the way it is now in eastern Ukraine, with tanks and well-armed radical nationalists. Of course, behind the self defence units of Crimean’s, we had our servicemen.”
00.34.20	Voice	“A lot of questions came in regarding the situation in Crimea, the referendum and sensationally Vladimir Putin admitted that those were indeed Russian troops on the ground in Crimea, but this was the only way for the referendum to be held and to avoid any sort of bloodshed.”
00.34.34	Sandford	RT is the one we see because it’s the one in the English language. But the main Russian state channels in Russia take this massive step further. And they can one day say black is white and the next day they say actually maybe its grey and then they’ll another day say that it’s black.
00.34.52	Rattansi	When it comes to the whole Ukraine crisis which I found so remarkable in the mainstream media were the number of Russian soldiers in Crimea, as if this was a big surprise. Ahm, you know. This is plainly absurd. Why will the mainstream media not realise the true story behind what was happening in the Ukraine?
00.35.12		I know. Because de facto the mainstream is taking their orders from NATO powers and [troops] of neo liberal [neocon] behaviour.
00.35.22	Nekrassov	You basically see American domination. American, American media dictates the terms to the western media. And that’s how it is. And that’s how it has been, for quite some time now. Ever since the cold war.
00.35.36	Judah	The Kremlin thinks in terms of narratives. Putin, his key advisors and of course Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia Today, don’t really believe in the truth. Don’t believe that there is such a thing as objective truth.
00.35.54	Pomerantsev	But what happens when that becomes an excuse to you know, inject this information. When, you know, having lots of truths means that you can just start making things up. When relativity gets to the point where any truth is as, is as important, well, to give an example,
00.36.13		RT will put a neo-Nazi on and say he’s got his own truth. They’ll put a madman on and say he’s got his own truth. What’s the difference between a conspiracy and a fact based argument.
00.36.22	Judah	Russia Today is in a sense the purest crudest TV news channel in the world. Complete rejection of truth, complete focus on viewing figures.
00.36.34	Pomerantsev	They had one show where they had interviews with Jewish leaders in Ukraine. One of them was the rabbi in Simperopol.
	[caption] presenter	Russia Today March 15, 2014 “More Nazi graffiti appears on the walls in Ukrainian cities and ultra-nationalists are giving key government posts, Kiev’s Jewish community feels they can no longer entrust their safety to the police.”
00.36.51	TV Fragment Kapustkin	“I don’t want to leave. I’m pushed to leave. Because if I want my children to feel safe…”
	voice-over	According to Russia Today the rabbi left Crimea because of anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of his synagogue and fear of Ukrainian nationalists. On the phone, rabbi Kapustkin tells us quite a different version of events.
00.37.12	[caption] Kapustkin	Voice: Misha Kapustkin They just made it look like that I was escaping from the Ukrainian nationalists. They made it look like. In fact I was escaping from Russian forces.
00.37.29	Pomerantsev	That is just, I mean that’s just this crass you know beyond any kind of journalistic boundary of behaviour.
	[caption] newsreader	Russia Today July 17, 2014 “Let’s go back to our breaking news story now, because a Middle Asian Boeing airplane has reportedly crashed in Ukraine’s east, where the military is battling against local self defence units.”
00.37.47	[caption] Firth	Sara Firth, former Russia Today reporter I was down just outside the office having a coffee with another colleague from RT when we got the flash on the phone alert, so we ran back up to the office to see, to see what was going on.
00.38.02		And we got RT, it was running on the TV but we were in one of the edit boots, we put it up on the laptop and we were all crowded around, and we were just horrified by the way that RT were covering it.
00.38.13		MH17 was just the, the final point. And I snapped. And then I, I put out on my twitter account that I, that I resigned.
	[caption] Wahl	Liz Wahl, former Russia Today anchor The more that I read up on what was really going on, the more I realised that the media was actually being used as a tool to stir confusion about what’s going on there.
00.38.34		I felt really uncomfortable with that. And I decided that the time had come that I was going to leave. After our coverage of the Ukraine wrapped up, I, I went of the teleprompter and I kind of spoke from the heart. Had a couple of, of thoughts scribbled down and, and that was it.
00.38.56	[caption] Wahl	Russia Today March 5, 2014 “And that is why personally I cannot be part of network funded by the Russian government. That whitewashes the actions of Putin. I’m proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth and that is why after this newscast, I’m resigning.”
00.39.13	Wahl	I felt shaky, I felt nervous, I felt ahm, almost shocked that I did it. But I felt kind of good.
	Firth	I was RT, I was part of that family and you know I was taking the money, I did have to take the rough with the smooth. And just, you know, when the rough comes it’s really rough. And there were a lot of questions that you can’t answer for yourself.
00.39.39	Rattansi	There is a fear, is there a fear maybe, that we must be covering the story because we’re somehow either doing it for the money or we are you know, Russian secret service agents. One cannot over exaggerate the levels of vitriol against RT journalists.
00.40.00		I don’t know Sara Firth’s particular circumstances, whether she was frightened off by it. But I firmly believe she was utterly wrong, when it came to her analysis of the kind of work she’s been doing, and being paid for by RT to do.
00.40.15	Pomerantsev	Just quoting a Russian media guru, Vassily Gatov he said, that if in the 20^th century the great problem was the 20^th century the problem was the battle against censorship. The battle e for freedom of information.
00.40.29		In the 21^st century the great problem is the media abuse of freedom of information.
00.40.34	Sambrook	One of the risks we have in the modern media age, is that audiences are no longer able to discern the quality and the basis of the information that media offers them. Because there’s so much of it out there and those, those traditional standards of being eroded by the fashion of saying there’s no such thing as objectivity,
00.40.51		there’s no such thing as the truth, there’s no such thing as a fact. Wrong. There is. And they matter.
	Pomerantsev	The danger is that what Russia is doing, is really gonna be the global trend in the 21^st century as there are more channels, as the [manner] of realities sort of proliferates and proliferates, do we just get to a point where we can’t have any kind of reality based conversation anymore.
00.41.10		And then things start to really come apart. Then you have this really anarchic future where everyone has their own version of the truth. All that matters is how you manipulate emotions. That’s what you know RT management and Russian sort of TV bosses say a lot.
00.41.22		We don’t need truth, it’s just about emotions. Ahm, and then you know, then everything sort of starts to come apart. And, and then the most sort of rapacious and the most cynical is gonna win in that kind of, in that kind of context.
00.41.37		[ending credits]

Main content

The World According to Russia Today

Citation

Main credits

Other credits

Docuseek subjects

Distributor subjects

Keywords