Press: RT America, You Were Very Weird and Bad

Russia Today started broadcasting in English from Moscow in 2005, with the stated intention of rehabilitating Russia’s global image by explaining Russian news and culture to the world. RT America came on the air five years later, shortly after the larger network’s name was shortened to the less conspicuous RT. “They wanted to speak to American audiences specifically,” says Mona Elswah, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute who studies state-controlled media. RT America would present American stories for American audiences, told predominantly by American hosts. And at first glance, the channel would seem sort of normal.

In 2020, Elswah and her colleague Philip Howard interviewed RT employees from several bureaus, including RT America, and used the anonymized responses to sketch a portrait of RT’s operations and aims. The organization had three goals, Elswah and Howard reported: “First, to push the idea that Western countries have as many problems as Russia. Second, to encourage conspiracy theories about media institutions in the West in order to discredit and delegitimize them … Third, to create controversy and to make people criticize the channel, because it suggests that the channel is important, an approach that would particularly help RT managers get more funding from the government.”

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