News with Moscow Accent

In 2015, Russia Today will transfer 15.38 billion rubles. -30 % more than in 2014

Another 6.48 billion rubles. He will receive the International Information Agency (MIA) "Russia Today". Total - more than half a billion dollars to convey to the world the point of view of the Kremlin

Photo: Arseniy Nesodimov/ITAR-TASS

September 20, bus stop in the center of Berlin, near the Bundestag. An elderly gray -haired man in a white shirt and a burgundy tie performs at a weekly rally against the war in Ukraine. There were not so many people, only 250 people, but they carefully listen to Jurgen Elsesser, the famous criticism of American imperialism, and now the fiery fan of Vladimir Putin. “All surveys show that the Germans today are the most peaceful and most friendly people in relation to Russia throughout Europe! We are a people who understand Putin! - says Elsesser, the crowd is approvingly buzzing in response. “The only thing that bothers us is the tiny political caste in the power system Merkel and its disgusting journalistic retinue.”

Elsesser is not just a street speaker, which in Germany is a lot, he is the publisher and editor -in -chief of the monthly magazine Compact, the first number of which was published back in 2010. At first, the magazine branded on his pages imperialist America, liberals, gay marks and sex education in schools, advocated traditional values ​​and against migrants, in support of Hugo Chavez and Mahmud Ahmadinejad. “Sometimes it was impossible to determine which camp the COMPACT and its editor-to the ultra-right or ultrailly, were constantly throwing them from side to side,” the independent German journalist Yan Filipp Heine is ironic in a conversation with The New Times. In 2012, at the peak and after the decline in the protest movement in Russia, the editorial line of the magazine was enriched with a new idol: Compact suddenly began to print the translations of the speeches of Vladimir Putin, taking the photo of the Russian president on the cover. Elsesser has been walking in the leg with the idol for two years now. “Vladimir Putin is in the original. Speech for the Germans and against lies, ”the so -called the special issue of the magazine in June 2014, in the midst of events in Ukraine. At the same time, Elsesser himself became a frequent guest of the Russian Today (RT)*channel, where he is invariably represented as an expert on German politics.

What kind of money there is a magazine, it is not entirely clear, there is almost no advertisement there, in retail it costs € 4.80, its circulation is about 16 thousand copies, which for Germany is very few-for example, the “spigel” spreads with a 400-thousandth circulation. But at the same time, Compact and its editor are regular participants in conferences, held by the Russian State NPC “Institute of Democracy and Cooperation”, which are led by the ex-deputy of the State Duma, Natalya Narochnitskaya. The experts of her institute are also frequent guests of RT television programs.

On Berlin!

If Compact has still the only media committee of Russian politics in Germany, from next year heavy artillery will come to the rescue: the International Information Agency (MIA) “Russia Today” ** will create one of the information nodes with a round -the -clock radio station, and the Russia Today TV channel will start broadcasting in German - this is exactly what, according to the editor -in -chief of RT and Mia Margaritas Simonyan, funds from additional funding will be sent. “RT in German and Compact - together they will stand against the war,” Jurgeen Elsesser joyfully responded to this news in his blog.

The second language, in which RT will speak, is a French, a separate studio will work in 2015 in Paris. Before starting French and German broadcasts, RT will launch sites and pages in social networks in appropriate languages.

As the New Times explained in the press service of RT, in the course of launching the German and French versions, RT will increase the state in Moscow, although there will be no additional bulky structures. Fixed assets are planned to be allowed for the construction of new television complexes in Berlin and Paris, as well as to distribute a signal.

In Berlin, RT even has a production base - the Ruptly GmbH International Information Agency created in April 2013. The company is engaged in the sale of video and photographs for the media, receiving, in turn, materials from RT partners in the Gaza, Cairo, Baghdad sector. Throughout the Ukrainian crisis, Ruptly was one of the information suppliers from Ukraine.

The motivation for starting broadcasting in German was formed not without creativity: the RT leadership posted a petition on the Openpetition.de website with a request to create a German version of the channel ***. At the time of delivery of the number under the petition, 30.5 thousand people signed up, which does not reach the required 100 thousand, but, according to Yana-Filipp Hein, this is not so little: “Even some daily German newspapers on their Facebook pages do not receive 30 thousand likes.”

The emphasis on Germany was not made by chance: “Firstly, here and without propaganda channels there is a strong pro-Russian lobby,” the diplomat of one of the European embassies in Moscow explained in a conversation with The New Times. “German businessmen to the last opposed the introduction of sanctions, and Angel Merkel was on their side.” However, according to the diplomat, everything changed when Vladimir Putin began not only to cunning in public, but Merkel personally lying in a conversation by phone: “From the very beginning of events in Ukraine, they sometimes called up several times a week, but at some point Merkel realized that Putin should not believe Putin.” This, according to the interlocutor of the magazine, was the biggest mistake of the Russian president: "He acquired Crimea, but lost to the angel."

However, the public from Germany from Germany is not susceptible to the anti-American and pro-Russian bias: “I think RT will have its own audience, first of all, this applies to ultra-right and ultra-lane circles,” said Yan Filipp Heine.

Save our ears

The German version of RT is not the only Russian media that intends to conquer the audience in Germany. Today in the Berlin office of Russia Today there are only two employees, including Director Dmitry Tulchinsky, but from next year the staff will be increased to 30 people. “I don’t know how much they will pay, but there are rumors that the salaries are rather big,” said Boris Wright Shuster, correspondent for the German magazine Focus.

As Dmitry Tulchinsky explained in an interview with Wall Street Journal, the task of the new structure is to “cover Russian politics abroad”. However, Tulchinsky seems to be modest, and the goals are more grandiose. According to Dmitry Kiselev, General Director of MIA Today (the defendant of the EU sanctions list), which is quoted by the same Wall Street Journal: “We must end the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on information flows,” because the Western media “are engaged in pure and uncovered propaganda”.

To represent the German audience “Honest” news, in early 2015 in Berlin, a full -fledged radio station will be launched with MIA money - with its own studio complex. As the New Times specified in the Moscow office of the MIA, the editorial office of the radio station and the RT channel will not intersect: "These will be completely different projects."

In addition to Berlin, the same MIA radio stations will be opened in Paris, Washington, London, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Dubai, Delhi, Beijing. The agency’s plans and expanding radio broadcasting in foreign languages: the former “Voice of Russia” will speak not only in Russian and German, but also in English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Serbian, Polish, Turkish, Chinese, Hindi, Pashtu, Farsi, Kurdish, Japanese, Urdu. Editorial centers with broadcasting in national languages ​​will be opened in the CIS countries.

However, as the agency’s press service emphasized, we are not talking about increasing the budget by 2.5 times, as the Russian media wrote about, “it is just disinformation, the MIA budget is the Russian Novice and Voice of Russia, and the costs of radio broadcasting significantly exceed the costs of agencies, this is due to the high cost distribution of the signal”. The real MIA budget is assured by the agency, in 2015 it will even be slightly reduced.

Trust is negative

The Russia Today Agency found its audience in the States. RT America is positioning itself as a newborn round -the -clock channel representing the English -speaking audience “A New Age of View of World Events”, as well as a “Russian view of international politics”. RT offices are open in Washington, New York, Miami and Los Angeles. The budget of the RT America, which has about 100 people, is not disclosed. In 2013, more than 1 million people were signed for RT in YouTube, according to the American resource Nymag.com, the audience of the channel website in July of the same year reached 6.32 million visitors against 4.93 million a year earlier.

The Independent Analytical Center Pew Research Center claims: according to the results of 2012, RT was the most watching channel in YouTube, even overtaking Fox News. According to RT itself, which the New Times managed to get in the channel’s press service, the current RT audience in the States is more than 80 million people.

The popularity of RT among the English -speaking audience is explained by the fact that the channel really represents the point of view on events in the Middle East, in Iraq, Afghanistan and the “catastrophic” role of the United States in regional conflicts. “This is the attractive side of RT for the Western viewer,” said Andrew McGregor Marshall, an independent journalist, a former chief of Reuters Bureau in Thailand. At the same time, he states an abundance on the air of RT “Frank Kremlin propaganda” when it comes to events related to Russia itself. “This was especially pronounced after the collapse of the Malaysian aircraft in Ukraine. An unconventional view of world problems and distortion of facts - all this is combined on RT, ”said Marshall in a conversation with magazine.

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The channel really represents the point of view excellent

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RT America is often quoted by American bloggers, however, scandals associated with frank falsification of some sensational revelations shook the reputation of the channel as a reliable source. In particular, wide publicity in the United States received a RT video about a gas attack on August 21, 2013 in a guta, a suburbs of Damascus, as a result of which, according to various estimates, from 281 to 1729 people died. The channel laid the responsibility for the attack on the Syrian opposition. The version was built on the testimonies of the “outstanding Syrian blogger” Brown Moses. However, it turned out that under this pseudonym, the British Eliot Higgins wrote, who declared the also that he was not the author of the video attributed to him, the accuracy of which seems very doubtful to him. A number of English -speaking media apologized to the readers for the link to RT, and the authoritative resource Gawker publicly pledged not to quote this channel.

Accusations of distorting facts and quotes against RT are also distributed from experts speaking in its air. “My words were completely distorted by RT. I no longer want to have anything in common with this garbage, ”said the New Times Kimberly Martin, professor of political science from Barnard College, without specifying, however, on what topic her comment was for the channel.

More than once they caught RT by the hand and American resources specializing in the fight against lies and falsification in the media space. Thus, the Politifact resource, which publishes its own scale of the "Purrants", attributed the words of the leading CrossStalk program to RT of Peter Lavell that he "himself is not a supporter of the theory of conspiracies and does not invite adherents of this theory to the studio", to the category of "impudent lies, from which the pants are burning." The same category includes the statement of RT that Barack Obama invested $ 5 billion in the destabilization of the political situation in Ukraine. Of the thirty loud “sensational revelations” of RT, analyzed by the resource, in fact, only two turned out to be truthful, four plausible, the rest were placed on the Politifact scale as a half -truth, half -plate, lies and impudent lies.

As the American expert Paul Hoobble from the Institute of Modern Politics explained, in the past - special adviser to Secretary of State James Baker (1989-1992) in the affairs of the USSR and the post -Soviet space, the most difficult thing for the viewer is to distinguish the truth from lies, because disinformation is often based on truth. “If we take 90 % real facts that will give the information product sufficient reliability, but add 10 % of the lies, then the conclusions will distort the whole picture and allow you to manipulate consciousness,” the expert says, citing the Kremlin’s propaganda campaign on the Crimean question as an example. “In the RT version, the message consists of three postulates: 1. Crimea has much closer historical ties with Russia than the rest of Ukraine - that there is a pure truth. 2. Crimea is the same Russian as Moscow - that is not true. 3. The Russians in the Crimea oppressed, persecuted, and their life was at risk, because Russia took them under its protection - that there is a frank lie. Together taken, these three allegations were weaving in the mass consciousness as a single reliable version of what is happening. ”

“My words were completely distorted by RT. I no longer want to have anything in common with this garbage

"

Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of New York University The New School, her interview with RT America on the Russian annexation of Crimea left the feeling that “it is like Fox News (a developmental television channel that gives news in an aggressive way and with a non-conservative slope.-The New Times), but only on steroids ”:“ It seemed that the presenters received a propaganda dungeon with possible questions and answers: if I say “a”, it is necessary to answer “B”. I was immediately compared with the Kremlin dictators and accused me of allegedly, I want to restore the Gulag, ”Nina Khrushcheva shared her experience with the journal of RT.

“When I noticed the presenter that she was distorting the facts,” Khrushcheva continues, “she proudly stated that she had learned this from the American media ...”

In protest against the information policy of RT, the television channel, loudly slamming the door, left the American Liz Wal, as well as the British editorial office of Sarah Fier. “The way such stories are distorted is quite dangerous. I don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore, ”Feunt announced on her Twitter a day after the tragedy of the Malaysian liner in Ukraine.

But RT fans in America are unlikely to be upset by this loss. As the episode with Nina Khrushcheva shows, a rather specific audience is engaged in regular viewing the TV channel’s programs: after an interview with the political scientist, her website was brought down by hackers, she began to receive insults on Twitter, and someone even distributed an open collective letter to the leading of The New School that “the university is shameful to keep such a professor.” And it already seems that on the wings of Russia Today, today's Russia was indeed transferred.