By Steven Erlanger
LONDON — The London newsroom and studios of RT, the television channel and website formerly known as Russia
Today, are ultramodern and spacious, with spectacular views from the
16th floor overlooking the Thames and the London Eye. And, its London
bureau chief, Nikolay A. Bogachikhin, jokes, “We overlook MI5 and we’re
near MI6,” Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies.
Mr.
Bogachikhin was poking fun at the charge from Western governments,
American and European, that RT is an agent of Kremlin policy and a tool
directly used by President Vladimir V. Putin to undermine Western
democracies — meddling in the recent American presidential election and,
European security officials say, trying to do the same in the
Netherlands, France and Germany, all of which vote later this year.
But
the West is not laughing. Even as Russia insists that RT is just
another global network like the BBC or France 24, albeit one offering
“alternative views” to the Western-dominated news media, many Western
countries regard RT as the slickly produced heart of a broad, often
covert disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic
institutions and destabilize the West.
Western attention focused on RT when the Obama administration and United States intelligence agencies judged with “high confidence” in January
that Mr. Putin had ordered a campaign to “undermine public faith in the
U.S. democratic process,” discredit Hillary Clinton through the hacking
of Democratic Party internal emails and provide support for Donald J. Trump, who as a candidate said he wanted to improve relations with Russia.
The agencies issued a report
saying the attack was carried out through the targeted use of real
information, some open and some hacked, and the creation of false
reports, or “fake news,” broadcast on state-funded news media like RT
and its sibling, the internet news agency Sputnik. These reports were
then amplified on social media, sometimes by computer “bots” that send
out thousands of Facebook and Twitter messages.
To many Americans, the impression that RT is an instrument of Russian meddling was reinforced when its programming suddenly interrupted C-Span’s online coverage of the House of Representatives in January. (C-Span later called it a technical error, not a hacking.)
Watching
RT can be a dizzying experience. Hard news and top-notch graphics mix
with interviews from all sorts of people: well known and obscure, left
and right. They include favorites like Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and
Noam Chomsky, the liberal critic of Western policies; odd voices like
the actress Pamela Anderson; and cranks who think Washington is the
source of all evil in the world.
But
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.
NYT World
