I have always been suspect of this site….you?
UK watchdog raps RT for biased reports
LONDON — RT, the state-owned Russian news channel, was reprimanded by Britain’s communications watchdog Monday for airing biased and misleading reports on Ukraine and Syria.
Ofcom found “significant” breaches of U.K. broadcasting rules in three separate programs screened by RT last year. It ordered the news channel to broadcast statements correcting two of the reports, but stopped short of imposing a fine.
With the latest findings, RT has been found in breach of U.K. regulations 14 times since it began broadcasting a decade ago.
RT, formerly Russia Today, has been increasingly prominent in Britain in recent years, advertising itself as an alternative to the dominant news providers.
Some lawmakers and broadcasters are nervous about its growing influence, amid concerns that it peddles the Kremlin’s view on foreign policy matters.
Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, said the network was “shocked and disappointed” at Ofcom’s findings. RT had submitted lengthy defences of the programs.
One of the breaches related to a program screened in July last year, The Truthseeker: Genocide of Eastern Ukraine, which aired claims that Ukraine’s government and military were committing atrocities in the east of the country, where the government is in conflict with pro-Russian separatists.
The 14-minute report drew parallels between Ukraine’s military and the Nazis. It concluded with a denial from Ukrainian officials that the government had committed atrocities, but this was insufficient for the program overall to appear impartial, Ofcom found.
Another episode of RT’s Truthseeker series, broadcast in March last year, which accused the BBC of “stunning fakery” in a report on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, was also found to be in breach of U.K. regulations.
RT misled viewers by implying that an official public investigation into the BBC report had uncovered wrongdoing, Ofcom said. The BBC was not treated fairly or given a chance to respond to the allegations, the regulator found.
“Ofcom found that RT broadcast content that was either materially misleading or not duly impartial,” the regulator said. “These are significant failings and we are therefore requiring RT to broadcast two clear statements on our decision which correct these failures.”
*** The next question is what about al Jazeera? In 2011, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media penned a piece on RT. In part:
Russia Today, an English-language channel provided in the U.S. and other Western countries, is funded by the Moscow regime of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, and recently hired an alleged Russian spy who is in the process of being deported from Britain.
Her first “story” for RT was to complain that Western governments have a “habit of lashing out at other countries for not listening to their people, while blithely ignoring public opinion on their own doorsteps.”
Russia Today has been described by Konstantin Preobrazhensky, himself a former Soviet KGB officer who defected to the West, as “a part of the Russian industry of misinformation and manipulation” designed to mislead foreign audiences about Russian intentions. He says Russia Today television utilizes methods of propaganda that are managed by Directorate “A” of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. He explains, “The specialty of Directorate ‘A’ is deceiving world public opinion and manipulating it. It has got a lot of experience over decades of the Cold War.”
In trying to attract and confuse an American audience, RT regularly features Marxist and radical commentators in the U.S. such as Noam Chomsky, Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and 9/11 “inside job” advocate and radio host Alex Jones.
