Courtesy of the Bastrop Advertiser
March 12, 2020
By Bill McCann
As I was TV channel surfing recently, I stopped at what appeared to be a slick news show with commentators I didn’t recognize. They were discussing a news story from the New York Times and Washington Post about Russia interfering in our 2020 elections.
A young woman commentator joked about the story as if it shouldn’t be taken seriously. Before I could check to see if I had mistakenly tuned to Fox News, the news shifted to a protest in London by supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He is being held by British authorities who are considering whether to extradite him to the United States to face charges of hacking and releasing classified military documents.
It was a one-sided story containing long interviews with supporters portraying Assange as some kind of hero. Assange also has been blamed for releasing materials stolen from Democrats by Russian hackers to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. The channel then switched to a commercial promoting itself: RT America. The gist of the commercial was that “mainstream” media are pawns of corporate owners and RT America offers a balanced alternative.
Balanced, my foot, I thought. Isn’t RT Russian television? Was I paying DirecTV to get Russian propaganda?
Wikipedia quickly confirmed for me that RT was formerly called Russia Today and is funded by Russia’s government. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find Russians in my living room. After all, Trump has kowtowed to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, even taking Putin’s word over that of U.S. intelligence experts about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
More recently, Trump fired his director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, after one of Maguire’s staff experts reportedly warned lawmakers in a classified briefing that Russia already was beginning to interfere in the 2020 election to help Trump.
Further research found that RT America, which is part of RT’s operations internationally, has been around since 2010. RT America is on station lineups of various satellite and cable providers, including DirecTV and Dish Network, according to RT America’s website. Spectrum (formerly Time Warner Cable) once carried RT America but dropped it in 2018.
A declassified January 2017 report by U.S. intelligence agencies described RT as a source of Russian propaganda trying to influence the 2016 election in part by running negative stories about Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. In November 2017, the Justice Department forced RT America to register as a foreign agent after years of allegations that it was a Putin propaganda machine.
Following my initial encounter with RT America, I tuned in several more times out of curiosity. I noticed it frequently makes a big deal of public demonstrations in the United States, England, France and elsewhere. Their commentators also regularly attack U. S. news media, like Trump does.
But they do seem to like presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders, maybe because Trump has telegraphed that he would rather face Sanders than former Vice President Joe Biden in November. Several times RT commentators suggested the news media were treating Sanders unfairly.
This is consistent with an analysis by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, as reported by Newsweek last week. The analysis found that Sanders received the most positive coverage of any presidential contender by Russian government-backed news outlets RT and Sputnik over the past 14 months. Only 16 percent of mentions of Sanders were negative, compared to 40 percent for Biden.
It’s not Bernie’s fault, but it speaks volumes about how Trump and Russia’s propagandists are aligned. I have decided not to watch RT America again. I hope other patriotic Americans won’t either. It’s the best message we can send the Russians to get the heck out of our living rooms.
