War without winners

Why is the sanctions against the RT channel in the USA - a big American error

Photo: Wikimedia.org

On the morning of November 30, supporters of the “mirror measures” in the Russian government received another gift: the US Congress deprived the Russian TV channel of RT accreditation. Two weeks before that, one of the legal entities related to the television channel fell into the American list of foreign agents, and then the restriction of access to the authorities in the United States was called as one of the most likely consequences of this decision.

These forecasts were justified, and the negative consequences of this decision will not first hit RT - few are waiting for their reports from the US Congress - but according to journalists working in Russia. Actually, many also warned about this, but, as the former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFol, put it on a similar reason: “It is impossible for Putin’s threat to incorrectly prevented us from acting correctly.” The threat arrived immediately: RT editor Margarita Simonyan immediately hinted at Telegram that "the American media will be left without accreditation in the State Duma and a combination today." And on December 1, it became known about the decision of the State Duma to prevent about 20 American media from correspondents from now on.

RT editor Margarita
Simonyan Photo: Flickr / Council
Federation

It is not entirely clear what exactly Simonyan had in mind, because neither American nor any other foreign journalists need any additional accreditation, except for the Card of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. But the senior comrades Simonyan quickly corrected: Senator Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the Federation Council Information Policy Committee, explained that this is precisely this simplified procedure for accessing authorities and will fall the victim of the Russian “mirror response”. It’s not that foreign correspondents will lose a lot from this: the other day an article has been published in the journal Foreign Policy, the author of which, for many years working in Moscow, complains that the Sobcks of foreign publications have long been virtually deprived of access to Russian officials, all applications for interviews and comments remain unanswered.

But this does not mean that the next - it seems that the inevitable - a round of escalation of foreign journalists cannot, for example, begin to deprive accreditation in Russia in an arbitrary order, even the law does not need to be changed - the Russian law on the media already provides for the possibility of “response of the media of the media of those states in which there are special restrictions for the professional activities of journalists of the media registered in the Russian Federation ”(True, the American company T&P Production LLC, which has become a foreign agent in the United States, is not registered in the Russian Federation, but these are already minor nuances).

The hypocrisy of the American Ministry of Justice did not go unnoticed and will certainly be used more than once as an occasion for "response"

The sad meme of “bombing Voronezh” did not appear from scratch, the policy of “beating your own so that strangers are afraid” in modern Russia is often and effectively applied, so the next one should prepare not only foreign correspondents in Russia, but also Russian journalists who work with foreign publications, and generally Russian journalists. Moreover, the American side is rapidly losing the remnants of the moral advantage in this conflict: expert centers enthusiastically make up black lists of “useful idiots”, cooperating with RT (to get enough to act on the air on whatever issue, not even related to politics), and the US congress took less than a month to disavow all the previous promises of the American authorities. In a statement by the US Department of Justice , made on November 13, regarding the inclusion of RT in the list of foreign agents, it is directly said that the Fara law does not impose any restrictions on freedom of speech and requires the agent only reporting. But the deprivation of the Russian accreditation television channel with the most important legislative body is precisely a restriction, it is impossible to interpret such a step otherwise. Of course, the hypocrisy of the American Ministry of Justice did not go unnoticed and will probably be used more than once as an occasion for “response actions”.

American employees of the RT attack on their freedom from their own authorities perceive very acutely

It is worth remembering that ordinary RT employees in the United States, as well as commentators and spectators, are American citizens (unlike the authorities brought from Moscow), whom Putin and in general Russian politics may interest quite little. For many of them, the air of RT is the only opportunity to perform in the “present”, not an amateur media. Even if their views may seem to the rest of the naive and unpopular, American RT employees perceive their freedom from their own authorities very sharply. Just as the Russian journalistic community is quite rightly outraged by the next prohibitive initiative in the spirit of “Let's declare foreign agents to all who go abroad according to exchange programs or for internships in foreign media”, or manipulative “exposure” of few independent media, which have partnership agreements with foreigners.

But the fate of ordinary journalists, it seems, is last worried about both the Russian authorities and the American ones. The Russian media analyst Vasily Gatov, who worked in RIA Novosti, before turning a respected agency into another propaganda mouthpiece, recalls the concept of the “counterintelligence state” formulated by the CIA, Robert Prungel. In such a state, society, believed that an attack is carried out on it, is indulging in spy -omania and all its failures are falling on the intrigues of enemies, and special services are freed from public control. If this sounds familiar to the Russian reader, then only because the Prungl model of the “counterintelligence state” described the Brezhnev period on the example of the USSR. But in the same regime there are now the United States, judging by the frantic searches of the “Russian trace” surrounded by Donald Trump and already with no reasonable arguments of the television channel with an endangatingly small audience.

We can quite rightly outraged by the astronomical numbers that RT requires for our activities, but in this situation, even the most consistent critics cannot but show solidarity with him. Because in the new Cold War, it seems that there will be no winners - and journalists will be lost in any case.