RT Turns 20

I'm in Moscow to help celebrate RT's 20th Anniversary. There's no place I'd rather be. Let me explain why.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor of RT

On June 7, 2005, Margarita Simonyan, an intelligent, articulate Russian journalist who had previously worked in the Kremlin press pool reporting for Rossiya, a leading Russian state television network, announced the creation of Russia Today. “It will be a perspective on the world from Russia,” she said. “Many foreigners are surprised to see that Russia is different from what they see in media reports. We will try to present a more balanced picture.”

Simonyan was 25 years old at the time.

RT went live on December 10, 2005, and the journalistic world has never been the same.

Russia Today, operating on a shoe-string budget of just $30 million (by way of comparison, CNN, a major American media outlet, had an operating budget of $2.5 billion in 2005) struggled to make a dent in the international news market.

Russia Today’s big break came in August 2008, during the short-lived Russian-Georgian War. Georgia and its Western allies painted the conflict as a flagrant example of modern-day Russian imperial ambition. Russia told a different story—that it was Georgia who was the aggressor, and that Russia was simply acting in accordance with its treaty obligations to defend South Ossetia from outside aggression.

Russia had brokered a ceasefire and negotiated an agreement in 1992 known as the “Sochi Agreement.” The agreement, which brought an end to fighting between Georgian and South Ossetian forces that had been raging since 1991, established a cease-fire between both the Georgian and South Ossetian forces, and defined a zone of conflict around the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali which would be monitored by a Joint Control Commission and a peacekeeping body, the Joint Peacekeeping Forces group (JPKF), which operated under Russian command.

The Georgian Army, on August 7, 2008, launched a military incursion into South Ossetia which occupied Tskhinvali and saw Georgia troops fire on the Russian peacekeeping force, killing and wounding scores of Russian soldiers.

The next day, on August 8, 2008, Russia responded with a massive military incursion of its own, driving the Georgian troops out of South Ossetia and subsequently advancing deep into Georgia, threatening the capital city of Tbilisi, before agreeing to a ceasefire brokered by the European Union.

At the time, both the Russian government and the European Union found that the Georgian military the fighting, a finding seconded by the Georgian government in April 2025, when Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze declared that “9former Georgian President Mikhail) Saakashvili started the war at the urging of external forces, on orders from the US State Department. The timeline of events is reflected, among other places, in a Council of Europe resolution and the Tagliavini Report, which state that on 7 August 2008, the regime at the time opened artillery fire on Tskhinvali, and the following day Russian troops entered Georgia.”

Julia Ioffe is a Russian-born émigré who moved to the United States at age seven in 1990, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History, specializing in Soviet History, from Princeton University in 2005, and later worked for two years in Russia as the as the Moscow correspondent for Foreign Policy and The New Yorker, where she developed a reputation as a “Putinologist”—someone who seeks to understand Russia today by deconstructing its leader and his policies. She has described the Russian-Georgia War as “Russia Today’s crucible” observing that, in the first days of the conflict, “when information was patchy and unreliable, RT became exactly what it set out to be: a source of information for the West about what the Russian position actually was.”

The numbers reflected this new reality: viewership of Russia Today topped out at just short of 15 million, and RT broadcasts on YouTube exceeded the one million mark (it should be noted that CNN had the same sort of “break” during the 1991 Gulf War, where the concept of a 24-hour news channel was shown to be attractive to a broader audience. CNN’s viewership during the Gulf War approached 10 million viewers.) According to Ioffe, the Russian-Georgian War was, from the perspective of RT, “the event that best showcased its abilities as a news organization, and that made it a recognizable brand in the West.”

For a “Putinologist” like Ioffe, Russia Today’s transition into the mainstream was baffling. “Russia Today,” she noted, “was conceived as a soft-power tool to improve Russia’s image abroad, to counter anti-Russian bias the Kremlin saw in the Western media.” But, Ioffe, lamented, “Often it seemed that Russia Today was just a way to stick it to the US from behind the façade of legitimate newsgathering.”

Ioffe cites the example of Alyona Minkovski, a Russian-born US citizen who hosted the “The Alyona Show”, a popular part of the RT line up from 2010-2012. When Fox News host Glenn Beck attacked RT for commenting on American political stories (in this case, a story about the New Black Panther Party), Minkovski fired back: “I get to ask all the questions the American people want answered about their own country because I care about this country and I don’t work for a corporate-owned media organization.”

The diminutive American RT host saved her best for last: “Fox…you hate Americans. Glenn Beck, you hate Americans. Because you lie to them, you try to warp their minds. You tell them that we’re becoming some socialist country…you’re not on the side of America. And the fact that my channel [RT] is more honest with the American people is something you should be ashamed of.”

Later, after he left Fox News, Beck himself admitted that his time at Fox News had been divisive for America. “I made an awful lot of mistakes,” he said in an interview with Megyn Kelly. “I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart.”

Of course, neither Julia Ioffe or any of the other “Putinologists” could admit that Alyona Minkovski and RT had a point. But the reality is that the anti-Russian elite who dominated the American intellectual and media scene didn’t matter—the American public did. And, as Alyosha Minkovski told CSPAN’s Brian Lamb in a 2011 interview, RT was “on cable in almost every single or every major city in the US. I know that we’re on cable in New York, in D.C., in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and I believe maybe North or South Carolina. Something, like, 20 to 22 million households now within the US can access RT on cable. Around the world, we’re on satellite. You can always watch us online. The Alyona Show has its own You Tube channel. You can go to the RT.com website and we livestream everything.”

In many ways, RT’s success (Russia Today officially changed its name to RT in 2009 “so as not to scare the audience,” Simonyan quipped) was its undoing. In 2012, a junior CIA analyst named Michael van Landingham, while working at the Open-Source Center, or OSC, authored a study entitled “Kremlin’s TV Seeks to Influence Politics, Fuel Discontent in US.” The “Kremlin TV” referenced was none other than RT.

The OSC was created in 2005 when the Director of National Intelligence transferred the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) to the Office of the Director for National Intelligence, renaming it the Open-Source Center. The mission remained the same—to collect information available from the Internet, databases, press, radio, television, video, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery, and to train intelligence analysts to make better use of this information.

In his report, Mr. van Landinghan observed that “RT America TV, a Kremlin-financed channel operated from within the United States, has substantially expanded its repertoire of programming that highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties. The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest. The Kremlin has committed significant resources to expanding the channel’s reach, particularly its social media footprint. A reliable UK report states that RT recently was the most-watched foreign news channel in the UK. RT America has positioned itself as a domestic US channel and has deliberately sought to obscure any legal ties to the Russian Government.”

When asked by Brian Lamb about who owns RT, Alyona Minkovski answered without hesitation, “RT is publicly funded. So its funded by the Russian government.”

And RT has published its budget for the public to see ($400 million in 2014).

So much for obscurity.

Moreover, the idea that a state-funded media is anathema to a free press is somewhat mooted by the existence of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an independent federal agency of the United States government that oversees civilian US international media (USIM), including the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia (RFA), and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. The BBG oversees 61 language services, 50 overseas news bureaus, 3,500 employees, and 1,500 stringers among the five media entities. In 2015, it had an annual budget of $751 million

According to the BBG, these networks are founded on the belief that it is in the interest of the United States to communicate directly with the people of the world and for the people of the world to have access to accurate information about local, regional, and global events, including in the United States. International audiences turn to VOA and the other BBG-supported media, the BBG asserts, because they count on their accuracy and reliability. If the BBG were to engage in propaganda, the BBG states, “our audiences would simply tune us out and we would not be able to accomplish our mission.”

In 2015 RT was the number one TV news network on YouTube, with nearly 3 billion views; more than half of that number belonging to the main RT YouTube channel. RT’s total monthly online audience reportedly exceeded 32 million unique users, and RT was the world leader among non-English speaking international TV news channels, and ahead Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America in terms of worldwide audience. RT also outperformed all other foreign broadcaster in the US market, with Nielsen research reporting that 2.8 million people in seven major US urban areas watch RT weekly, greater than the audience of Euronews, Deutsche Welle, NHK or France 24.

The world was listening and had apparently cast its vote: RT was a world leader in terms of viewership and influence.

RT’s success, however, wasn’t because the BBG had failed at its job, but rather because US mainstream media had failed at its job—informing the American public. There was a notable decline in the professionalism of American mainstream journalists which, when combined with a discernable reduction in media literacy and political polarization amongst the American people, led to a collective inability to understand the policy implications of the promises being made by politicians and their allies in the mainstream media. RT’s strength was exploiting the credibility gap created because of the collective incompetence of the US mainstream media and the American consumer at large, providing credible information that resonated with an audience that had grown increasingly skeptical and jaundiced.

Rather than admit that they were the problem, the American political class instead collaborated with their US mainstream media partners to shift the blame of an increasingly dysfunctional American society away from where it belongs—their own shoulders—and instead onto those of RT.

This issue came to a head in 2016, when the FBI and CIA, working hand in glove with the Democratic Party and the Obama administration, manufactured out of whole cloth allegations of Russian collusion with the campaign of Donald Trump during the 2016 election. The myths that sprang up about RT’s role in pushing for a Trump victory were as numerous as they were unfounded. But it didn’t matter—perception creates its own reality, and the repeated claims by respected senior members of the FBI and CIA made before the US Congress—and echoed by an unquestioning mainstream media—that Russian President Vladimir Putin had supported, aided and abetted the candidacy of Domald Trump became the gospel truth to those in search for a new Russian enemy.

James Comey, the former Director of the FBI, in testimony before the US Congress, noted that “[T]he Kremlin is waging an international disinformation campaign through the RT propaganda network which traffics in anti-American conspiracy theories that rivaled the extravagant untruths of Soviet era.”

But Comey’s assertion runs afoul of the conclusion reached by the CIA’s Peter Clement, who served as the Deputy Director of the Eurasia and Russian Mission Center during the period covered by the 2016 Presidential race, “A lot of our internal domestic problems are in fact of our own doing,” Clement declared, “I think the Russians have been very good at exploiting this. The polarization was already there. I don’t think this was generated by the Russians.”

“Exploiting”, however, has a multiplicity of meanings and definitions.

All RT was doing was reporting the truths about the 2016 national election.

The only “exploitation” taking place was filling the informational vacuum created by the failure of American mainstream journalism to do its job.

In January 2017 the Director of National Intelligence published what is known as an “Intelligence Community Assessment”, or ICA, about alleged Russian interference in the 1016 Presidential election. Appended to this declassified report was Michael van Landingham’s 2012 assessment of RT. Following the publication of that report, the Department of Justice determined that RT America comply with registration requirements under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

While the Russian government maintained (accurately, as it turns out) that it played no role in influencing the 2016 US Presidential election, the fact is that RT was simply doing what any responsible media outlet would do—report the news. RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, decried the Department of Justice’s decision, but noted that it would comply with the demand in order to avoid further legal action by the US government.

“Between a criminal case and registration, we chose the latter. We congratulate American freedom of speech and all those who still believe in it,” Simonyan noted on her Twitter account.

The US State Department at the time stated that registration as a foreign agent was a mere formality that would not affect the broadcaster’s operation in the US. And yet immediately after the State Department made this statement, the US Congress stripped RT of its credentials, citing its FARA registration as the reason.

Once again it was left to RT to articulate the importance of free speech in America, and the danger of having the notion of a free press trampled on by the US government.

“To all the self-righteous defenders of ‘freedom of speech’”, Simonyan said after the Congressional decision was announced, “who oh-so-ardently proclaimed that FARA registration places no restrictions whatsoever on RT’s journalistic work in the US: Withdrawal of Congressional credentials speaks much louder than empty platitudes. And to borrow from Orwell, all ‘foreign agents’ are equal, but looks like only RT is denied congressional accreditation on the basis of FARA status, while the likes of NHK and China Daily carry-on business as usual, and US officials continue to claim that the forced FARA registration for RT America’s operating company isn’t at all discriminatory.”

In late 2019 I was contacted by an editor with RT’s online English language web service, RT.com, about writing content for their web page. At that time, I was already being published on a regular basis by The Washington Spectator, The Huffington Post, TruthDig, The American Conservative, and Consortium News. I would not be an employee of RT, but rather a contributor who would be compensated for each article. The agreed upon level of compensation was on par with the media outlets which already published me.

My very first article, “‘Russian aggression’ is just a pretext for US politicians to further bloat 2020 defense budget, while Moscow won’t even care”, was published on December 23, 2019. “By including provisions to stop Russian pipelines and target Russia’s actions in Syria,” I wrote, “the new US defense budget demonstrates Washington’s overreach, but likely does nothing to rein in Vladimir Putin.”

It turned out that my analysis here, and in my other articles published on RT, withstood the test of time.

I will note that the RT editorial “touch” was the lightest of any outlet I’ve ever been published it. I was the originator of most of my ideas, although on occasion RT would ask me to write about some breaking news (literally the conversation would go something like this: “Trump is speaking today on defense spending. Would you be able to write something about this?”).

The notion that I parted with any notion of journalistic or ethical integrity by having articles I wrote published in RT is absurd.

And yet, in September 2020 the Journal of Communications published an article, “Anything that causes chaos: The organizational behavior of Russia Today (RT)”, authored by Mona Elswah and Philip Howard. Ms. Elswah was a graduate of Oxford University’s Internet Institute, where she received her PhD. During that time, she served as a research associate of her PhD supervisor, Philip Howard. Howard specialized in what is known as “computational propaganda” and has made a career out of writing and researching about the nexus between democracy and technology on behalf of his underwriters, who include George Soros’ Open Society, the German Marshall Project, and the National Endowment for Democracy, who’s affiliated agency, the National Democratic Institute, awarded him the “Democracy Prize” in 2019 (former US Secretary of State Madaleine Albright made the presentation.)

Curiously, the Elswah-Howard paper opted from the start to avoid discussing the content presented by RT but rather zeroed in on RT’s “organizational behavior”, which was defined as “an applied behavioral science that investigates the impact individuals, groups, and structure have on behavior within a certain organization.”

Elswah-Howard, in their paper, sought to “advance the theory about the organizational behavior within the newsroom and news production” to explain “why some sources of political news and information produce the content they do.”

After declaring that RT was founded on a legacy of Soviet-era media practices where central authority dictated journalistic outcomes, the authors note that the best description of RT is a “neo-Soviet” model called “neo-authoritarian” in which media outlets “have limited autonomy and where private ownership is, to some extent, tolerated.”

Are you confused? I am.

“Although it might be tempting to compare RT’s organizational behavior with other media outlets,” the authors wrote, “this study focusses only on RT.”

The author’s then decried RT’s practice of having its employees sign non-disclosure agreements, something every major US mainstream media organization does as standard practice.

But we’re just talking about RT here.

Don’t get distracted.

“RT’s organizational behavior,” the authors later conceded, “may share some practices with other news organizations.”

But RT was different. “Journalists at RT,” the authors observed, “continue to be subject to Soviet-style socialization and self-censoring.”

The main “tactic” used by RT in this regard was “socialization”.

“Socialization at RT,” the authors wrote, “depends largely or earning the loyalty of the journalists” by “”integrating the attitudes, habits and state of mind into the employees which should then lead them to reach decisions in favor of the organization.”

In short, RT treated its employees with respect and paid them well.

RT’s editorial control was exerted by publishing a “style guide” on “terms journalists should use to refer to regimes, countries and political groups.”

I regularly write for Energy Intelligence, a major on-line publication.

Energy Intelligence has a style guide that I must adhere to.

It doesn’t make them controlling—just professional.

The authors of the study on RT’s organizational behavior state that they “were able to obtain a copy of the guide that is being handed to newly hired journalists to help them understand the production process. This document,” the authors concede, “does not provide any political editorial directives but, rather, provides a professional guide for journalists who are just starting their career at RT.”

The authors, unable to document their theories about RT’s controlling practices, then cite unnamed sources who speculate that journalists at RT “were being told about the editorial policies of the channel through internal talks with the editors, rather than through a formal, written style guide. The journalistic socialization at RT”, the authors conclude, “is mostly pursued during casual day-to-day directives.”

Back to the conclusions reached by the author’s regarding RT’s “socialization” of its journalist. “RT’s social controls do not focus upon coercion and fear,” they concluded, “but rather the benefits of working for RT,” noting that “non-Russian journalists often joined and stayed with RT for career progression.”

The goal of the paper was to denigrate RT, and the author’s spent a great deal of time trying to do just that. But at the end of the day, the only fact-based assertions they could make was that RT operated as a legitimate journalistic organization, and that it was a great place to work.

This reality escaped the United States Department of Justice, however. The theory that RT was an organ of Russian state propaganda or, worse, an active participant in a broader campaign designed to sow chaos and confusion amongst an American audience in order to manipulate it to achieve electoral outcomes preferred by the Russian government, underpinned every judgement made by the Department of Justice.

In 2024, the Department of Justice weaponized this theory, launching a frontal assault on RT and people affiliated with RT. My home was raided by the FBI, as was the home of an RT producer who used to book my appearances on RT news programs. RT was declared a “foreign mission”, which precluded any operations on US soil.

I’ve written about my experiences in this regard, and how I view them as a frontal assault on free speech and a free press in the United States.

I have previously wrote about by extensive experience working as a journalist with CNN, NBC News, and Fox News. When it came to issues of national security importance, the news rooms of all three organizations, I wrote,” were literally subordinated to the US government, taking their talking points directly from either the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon.

In short, these news organizations did not produce news, but rather American propaganda which was designed to deceive the broader American audience about critical issues of war and peace.

The news organizations I observed firsthand were more representative of a state-controlled media than a free press.

I also noted that, “if called upon to compare and contrast, based upon my own personal experiences, the level of journalistic integrity between these US media outlets and RT, RT wins hands-down.”

I stand by this assessment.

When I received the invitation to attend RT’s 20^th Anniversary celebration, every fiber of my body screamed at me to turn it down.

I had just had my passport returned to me this past summer, and had already made a visit to Russia that proceeded with no interference from the US government (my passport had been seized on June 3, 2024, as I was preparing to board a flight to Saint Petersburg, where I was scheduled to appear of two panels hosted by RT.)

The FBI had just begun returning to me items they had seized during their raid on my home in August 2024.

The safe choice would have been to simply decline the invitation without comment.

But RT is a legitimate media organization whose voice provides essential information and perspective to an American audience being denied just that by US mainstream media outlets.

Free speech and a free press go hand in hand.

And for America to truly be a land where free speech and a free press exist in more than just theory, the RT must be able to practice its particular brand of journalism free from restriction or stigma.

As President Trump and President Putin navigate the troubled waters of current US-Russian relations toward a destination marked by normalcy and mutual respect, one can only hope that the restoration of RT as a news organization untainted by the unjust and inaccurate label of “foreign mission” or “foreign agent” will be part of whatever arrangements are made in this regard.

But perceptions create their own reality, and as long as people act as if RT is somehow leprous when it comes to the practice of journalism, then change will be slow, if at all.

If I turned down RT’s invitation, then I would be reinforcing the impression that RT was somehow tainted and not worthy of being treated as the legitimate journalistic organization that it, in fact, is.

In this regard, I had no choice but to accept as a matter of principle.

But allow me to conclude with something even more important.

Forget politics.

Let’s talk about people.

The producers, editors and journalists at RT with whom I have had the pleasure of working with over the course of the past six years have been some of the most decent human beings imaginable—genuinely good people who care deeply about others not from any professional mandate, but rather because they are, in their hearts, fundamentally decent human beings.

It is an honor and privilege to know them and count them as friends and colleagues.

And I will be proudly standing side by side with these amazing people later today as we collectively celebrate the anniversary of an organization that has, literally, changed the world we live in.

For the better.

Happy 20^th Anniversary RT.

May you celebrate many more.