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ONCE UPON A TIME
Margarita Simonyan is RT's Editor-in-Chief.
http://on.rt.com/qjcbas
Published time: March 09, 2015 11:11
Control room of RT's English-language newsroom. (RIA Novosti /
Evgeny Biyatov)
Once upon a time - last October, to be precise - I gave an interview to
a TIME magazine correspondent for the publication's indepth profile on
RT. Late last week that piece finally appeared on America's newsstands.
The opus is an object lesson in writing on RT, which over the
last year or so has blossomed into its own cottage industry: full
of half-truths, half-quotes and full-on commitment to fitting your
subject into an existing narrative box, rather than an attempt to
understand or discover anything new.
In an effort to give the article a sense of timeliness, the author
uses the backdrop of Boris Nemtsov's murder to frame the RT story. How
did RT treat this tragic, headline-grabbing event that reverberated
around the world, and the tens of thousands-strong Moscow march that
followed it? According to TIME: "On March 1, when a massive march began
in Moscow to protest Nemtsov's murder - with many carrying signs that
read propaganda kills - RT was showing a documentary about American
racism and xenophobia."
Would you like to know what TIME was writing about on March 1? It was
comparing the merits of two new models of the Samsung smartphone. A
poignant story indeed!
If this example seems like an attempt to purposefully mislead the
audience about the quality TIME's journalism, it's because it is. But
it's the same as TIME's deliberate avoidance of the fact that the
Nemtsov mourning rally was the lead story on RT's March 1 hourly news
bulletins from 8 am till midnight, with live updates published across
our websites and social media platforms throughout the day.
If the introductory presentation of RT is based on brazen omissions,
then the next part is a classic example of misdirection, and
concerns every mainstream media hound's favorite bone - RT's
financing. Now, I can empathize with the challenge of trying to
write an honest-to-goodness sad-sack story about the outspent (and
new favorite epithet, "outgunned") Western media at a time when RT
is broadcasting multiple 24/7 TV channels around the world for the
mind-blowing sum of $225 million, while the UK's BBC World Service and
the US' Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG, which includes Voice of
America and Radio Free Europe) - both running predominantly online and
radio services with small and sporadic television presence in a handful
of regions - receive $375 million and $721 million respectively.
But TIME certainly gets an A for effort. First, this stateside magazine
with largely US audience pretends that American government-funded
BBG doesn't exist. Then, it compares the financing of RT to the BBC
World Service (with the BBC correctly coming out as more generously
subsidized, even though TIME uses RT's obsolete budget figure to
narrow the gap), but pivots to a qualifier: "The BBC's International
Service is the biggest broadcast newsgathering operation in the world."
To achieve this kind of status on such a relatively conservative
budget would be remarkable indeed - if only it were true. The problem
is that BBC's "International Service" isn't a thing in and of itself.
It is the newsgathering department of BBC News (budget - $530 million),
which is part of the British Broadcasting Corporation (budget - over
$7 billion), funded through the license fee that is charged to every
UK household with a TV.
This department feeds a substantial part of the content of BBC World
News, the UK's global news channel and RT's closest counterpart.
Formally, BBC World News is set up as a private entity (it is owned by
BBC Global News Ltd, the commercial arm of the BBC) and its budget is
unknown. BBC News also lends its resources (from newsgathering to the
newsroom space) to the BBC World Service (that's the mostly radio and
online service with a $375-million budget that TIME talks about - also
funded through the UK TV license). If by now all those structural and
budgetary cross-overs seem a little murky, it's because they are. TIME
is obviously counting on its readers to gloss over the details.
So TIME laments: "What is the West to do in the face of a form of
richly endowed propaganda?" Yes, what IS the west - with its BBG,
BBC News/World News/World Service, CNN International (that has never
contradicted a State Department position), Deutsche Welle, France
24, Euronews, and countless newspapers and magazines (including
TIME) read around the world - to do in the face of RT and its $225
million? Poor dears!
But the pièce de resistance of the article is my actual interview.
Back in October, the TIME correspondent and I spoke in my offices
for an hour and a half. This discussion is reduced to some 60 words
(in an essay of 2,800) spread across 5 quotes, plus there is one
more quote from our London correspondent. So much for the "inside"
look at RT, touted in the headline.
One of the quotes is from our discussion of what makes up the Russian
point of view, the presentation of which is one of RT's stated goals.
I said that this worldview is "defined by certain principles expressed
by the state: by representatives of the Russian state, if you talk
to people on the street, if you look at different polls with Russian
people as a whole - you will see that one of the important things that
we do not like in the existing world order is the desire of Western
countries to make unilateral judgments about what is good, what is
bad in the countries far removed from them, about which they know very
little, and take military actions based on those unilateral judgments."
This is what is left of this quote in print: the worldview is "defined
by certain principles expressed by the state, by representatives of the
Russian state." Notice a difference? Of the constituencies that are
part of the Russian state and define its views, goals and grievances
only state representatives make the cut. The opinion of the Russian
people is irrelevant. A decade ago I might have been surprised.
Image source: Google Maps
By the way, sometimes those representatives call me on my "old yellow
telephone" - in plain sight in my office where I give most of the
interviews - "to discuss secret things." What kinds of secret things?
Mostly budgets (seeing as RT is publicly funded) and the president's
travel details to coordinate the work of our pool reporters. I said as
much to the TIME reporter. Of course, only the conspiratorial-sounding
"secret things" comment made the cut. Again, in the good old days I
expected higher standards from the Western press...
There are also smaller, funnier fact- and bias-fails that have
crept into the piece, like the detail that I gave my interview in
the office just across the river from the Kremlin (did we move and
I hadn't noticed? At least someone remembered to pack the phone).
Or that in 2002 I "got a job as a reporter for state TV in Moscow,
assigned to the Kremlin pool" - never mind that I've already been
with the same employer for years, heading up the channel's regional
bureau and continuing my work as a war reporter, which started in
1999 in Chechnya, then took me to Abkhazia in 2001 and Beslan, North
Ossetia in 2004.
(Side note: does TIME have a quota for how often Kremlin must be
mentioned in an article about RT?)
Or that the "propaganda war" that the west is ostensibly losing is
desperately "one-sided" (except for the headlines screaming about
Russia's "Uncontrolled Violence," "Putin's Missile", "The Fascist in
the Kremlin," or how "Russia Wants to Restore Soviet Union").
But if I had to nit-pick every piece of nonsense said or written
about RT, I'd have no time left to run"Putin's on-air machine."
From: A. Papazian
Margarita Simonyan is RT's Editor-in-Chief.
http://on.rt.com/qjcbas
Published time: March 09, 2015 11:11
Control room of RT's English-language newsroom. (RIA Novosti /
Evgeny Biyatov)
Once upon a time - last October, to be precise - I gave an interview to
a TIME magazine correspondent for the publication's indepth profile on
RT. Late last week that piece finally appeared on America's newsstands.
The opus is an object lesson in writing on RT, which over the
last year or so has blossomed into its own cottage industry: full
of half-truths, half-quotes and full-on commitment to fitting your
subject into an existing narrative box, rather than an attempt to
understand or discover anything new.
In an effort to give the article a sense of timeliness, the author
uses the backdrop of Boris Nemtsov's murder to frame the RT story. How
did RT treat this tragic, headline-grabbing event that reverberated
around the world, and the tens of thousands-strong Moscow march that
followed it? According to TIME: "On March 1, when a massive march began
in Moscow to protest Nemtsov's murder - with many carrying signs that
read propaganda kills - RT was showing a documentary about American
racism and xenophobia."
Would you like to know what TIME was writing about on March 1? It was
comparing the merits of two new models of the Samsung smartphone. A
poignant story indeed!
If this example seems like an attempt to purposefully mislead the
audience about the quality TIME's journalism, it's because it is. But
it's the same as TIME's deliberate avoidance of the fact that the
Nemtsov mourning rally was the lead story on RT's March 1 hourly news
bulletins from 8 am till midnight, with live updates published across
our websites and social media platforms throughout the day.
If the introductory presentation of RT is based on brazen omissions,
then the next part is a classic example of misdirection, and
concerns every mainstream media hound's favorite bone - RT's
financing. Now, I can empathize with the challenge of trying to
write an honest-to-goodness sad-sack story about the outspent (and
new favorite epithet, "outgunned") Western media at a time when RT
is broadcasting multiple 24/7 TV channels around the world for the
mind-blowing sum of $225 million, while the UK's BBC World Service and
the US' Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG, which includes Voice of
America and Radio Free Europe) - both running predominantly online and
radio services with small and sporadic television presence in a handful
of regions - receive $375 million and $721 million respectively.
But TIME certainly gets an A for effort. First, this stateside magazine
with largely US audience pretends that American government-funded
BBG doesn't exist. Then, it compares the financing of RT to the BBC
World Service (with the BBC correctly coming out as more generously
subsidized, even though TIME uses RT's obsolete budget figure to
narrow the gap), but pivots to a qualifier: "The BBC's International
Service is the biggest broadcast newsgathering operation in the world."
To achieve this kind of status on such a relatively conservative
budget would be remarkable indeed - if only it were true. The problem
is that BBC's "International Service" isn't a thing in and of itself.
It is the newsgathering department of BBC News (budget - $530 million),
which is part of the British Broadcasting Corporation (budget - over
$7 billion), funded through the license fee that is charged to every
UK household with a TV.
This department feeds a substantial part of the content of BBC World
News, the UK's global news channel and RT's closest counterpart.
Formally, BBC World News is set up as a private entity (it is owned by
BBC Global News Ltd, the commercial arm of the BBC) and its budget is
unknown. BBC News also lends its resources (from newsgathering to the
newsroom space) to the BBC World Service (that's the mostly radio and
online service with a $375-million budget that TIME talks about - also
funded through the UK TV license). If by now all those structural and
budgetary cross-overs seem a little murky, it's because they are. TIME
is obviously counting on its readers to gloss over the details.
So TIME laments: "What is the West to do in the face of a form of
richly endowed propaganda?" Yes, what IS the west - with its BBG,
BBC News/World News/World Service, CNN International (that has never
contradicted a State Department position), Deutsche Welle, France
24, Euronews, and countless newspapers and magazines (including
TIME) read around the world - to do in the face of RT and its $225
million? Poor dears!
But the pièce de resistance of the article is my actual interview.
Back in October, the TIME correspondent and I spoke in my offices
for an hour and a half. This discussion is reduced to some 60 words
(in an essay of 2,800) spread across 5 quotes, plus there is one
more quote from our London correspondent. So much for the "inside"
look at RT, touted in the headline.
One of the quotes is from our discussion of what makes up the Russian
point of view, the presentation of which is one of RT's stated goals.
I said that this worldview is "defined by certain principles expressed
by the state: by representatives of the Russian state, if you talk
to people on the street, if you look at different polls with Russian
people as a whole - you will see that one of the important things that
we do not like in the existing world order is the desire of Western
countries to make unilateral judgments about what is good, what is
bad in the countries far removed from them, about which they know very
little, and take military actions based on those unilateral judgments."
This is what is left of this quote in print: the worldview is "defined
by certain principles expressed by the state, by representatives of the
Russian state." Notice a difference? Of the constituencies that are
part of the Russian state and define its views, goals and grievances
only state representatives make the cut. The opinion of the Russian
people is irrelevant. A decade ago I might have been surprised.
Image source: Google Maps
By the way, sometimes those representatives call me on my "old yellow
telephone" - in plain sight in my office where I give most of the
interviews - "to discuss secret things." What kinds of secret things?
Mostly budgets (seeing as RT is publicly funded) and the president's
travel details to coordinate the work of our pool reporters. I said as
much to the TIME reporter. Of course, only the conspiratorial-sounding
"secret things" comment made the cut. Again, in the good old days I
expected higher standards from the Western press...
There are also smaller, funnier fact- and bias-fails that have
crept into the piece, like the detail that I gave my interview in
the office just across the river from the Kremlin (did we move and
I hadn't noticed? At least someone remembered to pack the phone).
Or that in 2002 I "got a job as a reporter for state TV in Moscow,
assigned to the Kremlin pool" - never mind that I've already been
with the same employer for years, heading up the channel's regional
bureau and continuing my work as a war reporter, which started in
1999 in Chechnya, then took me to Abkhazia in 2001 and Beslan, North
Ossetia in 2004.
(Side note: does TIME have a quota for how often Kremlin must be
mentioned in an article about RT?)
Or that the "propaganda war" that the west is ostensibly losing is
desperately "one-sided" (except for the headlines screaming about
Russia's "Uncontrolled Violence," "Putin's Missile", "The Fascist in
the Kremlin," or how "Russia Wants to Restore Soviet Union").
But if I had to nit-pick every piece of nonsense said or written
about RT, I'd have no time left to run"Putin's on-air machine."
From: A. Papazian