RT

RT, 24-hour international news network headquartered in Moscow and funded by the Russian government. RT was known as Russia Today from 2005 to 2009 and is still referred to by that name. It broadcasts in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian. Its French and German channels were shut down in 2023, less than a year after RT America ceased operations. While the official RT position is that the network seeks only to present an “alternative point of view” on world affairs, it is widely accepted that RT is a thinly veiled government propaganda network that exists to further the interests of the Kremlin. It does this primarily by disseminating and promoting misinformation and disinformation.

RT editor in chief Margarita Simonyan told Russian newspaper Kommersant that the network’s purpose is “conducting the information war…against the whole Western world.” To that end, she has a secure telephone line to the Kremlin in her office. Virtually all of the network’s funding comes from the Russian government, and its editors—who approve all stories and often order revisions to match the official government narrative—are appointed by the state.

Beginnings and mission

The launch of Russia Today was announced on June 7, 2005, by Simonyan, who has been the editor in chief of RT from its beginning. Its English-language channel first went live on December 10 of that year, with three satellites beaming stories to Europe and the United States. RT’s initial goal was to promote Russia’s “soft power,” challenging international stereotypes of Russia as backward and spreading awareness of Russian culture and history.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

According to both observers and journalists who later left RT, the network’s mission changed during the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. RT reporters were the only ones given access to Russian troops during the conflict, and their job was explicitly to advance the goals of the Kremlin by publishing stories that would support the government narrative—to the point that some stories were rejected or edited in order to ensure they fit the “party line.”

After the 2008 conflict RT’s content focus moved away from Russia and toward the rest of the world, establishing RT operations in the United States in 2010, Germany in 2014, and France in 2017. It also expanded its online footprint. Its goals were to promote the idea that Western countries were just as corrupt as Russia, to encourage conspiracy theories that discredited Western institutions and culture, and to create controversy in order to raise traffic to RT platforms.

A name and strategy pivot

In 2009 Russia Today changed its name to RT, in Simonyan’s words, “so as not to scare the audience.” In 2010 it announced its new slogan, “Question more,” an implicit justification of its turn toward promoting conspiracies. RT programs have interviewed or been hosted by proponents of a wide variety of conspiracy theories, including those who question whether Barack Obama was born in the United States (birtherism), 9/11 “truthers,” and anti-vaccination advocates. RT seems equally comfortable advancing conspiracy theories embraced by both the left and the right, interviewing right-wing extremist Alex Jones, who denied that the Sandy Hook school shooting took place, in 2008 and left-wing extremist Malik Zulu Shabazz, known for his violent antisemitism, in 2009.

RT’s philosophy is that all media is inherently biased and that the goal of a media entity should be to make as many people as possible believe its own narrative. The network sees disinformation as a key tool to destabilize countries in ways that benefit the purveyor of the disinformation.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Crimea, Ukraine, and backlash

In 2014 RT became yet more committed to information warfare in its coverage of the Russian invasion of Crimea and its further incursions into Ukrainian territory. All nonpolitical programming on RT was canceled, and the heavy-handed information manipulation prompted an anchor for RT America to resign during live a broadcast. From this point on, the interests of the Russian state were transparently the driver of RT coverage. An example of this was apparent in RT’s 2015 coverage of Turkey after Turkish warplanes hit Russian military aircraft over Syrian territory. The initial RT coverage of Turkey was negative, but, after the Turkish and Russian governments reached a diplomatic agreement several months later, RT’s coverage of Turkey turned positive.

In 2016 RT’s role in spreading disinformation about U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom brought public scrutiny to its activities and agenda. Publicly released U.S. intelligence reports labeled RT a “state-run propaganda machine,” and in 2017 RT America complied with an order from the U.S. Department of Justice to register as a foreign agent acting to influence the U.S. government on behalf of the Russian state.

After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many countries directly sanctioned RT as an agent of the Russian government. Its license to operate in the U.K. was revoked, its broadcasts were banned in Germany and France, and its RT America bureau closed. The European Union banned RT content on YouTube, Meta, and TikTok within its borders. YouTube blocked all access to RT in March 2022, Apple and Google removed the RT mobile app, and Google restricted RT’s ability to monetize its content.

At its peak in the mid-2010s, RT claimed to have a massive international viewership. However, reports leaked from the network and other evidence suggest that these viewer numbers were at least exaggerated. RT’s reach was never comparable to that of major American or European broadcast networks, but that may have been beside the point. RT’s strategy since the 2010s has been to target controversies and moments of unrest in other countries, then to produce coverage aimed at exacerbating that unrest.

This strategy may have been most successful in using social media instead of traditional media to fuel societal unrest. During protests in Chile in 2019, RT was ranked as the ninth most influential and ninth most shared content creator in that country. In Colombia in 2021, RT videos about police repression of demonstrators stoked discontent against the government.