The Iron Lady of Russian Media

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“Do you remember the August war of 2008? Back then, most Western media outlets acted as if they were Georgia's ministry of defense.”

After that war Russia realized that they need a real media for the world and not the prostitute medias of the West who lie, manipulate and makes makebelieve stories by journalists who are not real journalists. The old fashioned journalism was back in the world as RT (Russia Today). CNN and BBC have moved backstage.

 

“Russia Today is already more successful than all other foreign broadcast stations available in major US cities, such as San Francisco, Chicago and New York. In Washington, 13 times as many people watch the Russian program as those that tune into Deutsche Welle, Germany's public international broadcaster. Two million Britons watch the Kremlin channel regularly. Its online presence is also more successful than those of all its competitors. What's more, in June, Russia Today broke a YouTube record by being the first TV station to get a billion views of its videos.”

Russia Today's Editor-In-Chief: 'The West Never Got Over the Cold War Stereotype'

August 13, 2013

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-russia-today-editor-in-chief-margarita-simonyan-a-916356.html

 

Margarita Simonyan, 33, is the editor-in-chief of the state-funded satellite news network Russia Today. In a SPIEGEL interview, she contends that Western journalists prefer to paint Russia as an evil aggressor and that her station is not an outlet for government propaganda.

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has created an anti-CNN for Western audiences with the international satellite news network Russia Today. He commissioned the network in order to "break the monopoly of the Anglo-Saxon mass media." The government seems to be succeeding in its task, with the network gaining more viewers in major cities in the United States that any other foreign broadcaster.

In Washington, 13 times as many viewers tune in to Russia Today than they do its German equivalent Deutsche Welle. A total of 2 million Brits watch the program. On Youtube, the Moscow-based broadcaster recently broke the one-billion-hit barrier, becoming the first broadcaster in the world to do so. Editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, 33, views the broadcaster as a sort of ministry of media defense for Russia.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your network sees itself as a counterweight to the major US broadcasters. How did you manage to poach CNN legend Larry King, 79, of all people?

Simonyan: You'd have to ask him that question, but I do know that he is happy to get back into the game.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What can Russia Today offer King that others can't?

Simonyan: I can quote him from an interview he gave recently: "I thought I could retire, but I love my job. I thought I wouldn't miss it, but I do."

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your network is funded by the Russian government. What is its mission statement?

Simonyan: If you tune in to CNN or the BBC on a regular day, 80 or 90 percent of the stories are identical. We want to show that there are more stories out there than the 10-a-day that you usually encouter. I'm not saying that you should watch only our program; I'm saying that you should also watch it.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Russian media have a slightly more dramatic take on your objectives. Many are comparing the network to the Ministry of Defense. You said it yourself, when Russia goes to war …

Simonyan: … then we will join them in battle, yes. That goes for the country's real, armed conflicts. Do you remember the August war of 2008? Back then, most Western media outlets acted as if they were Georgia's ministry of defense.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In 2008, Russian troops invaded Georgian territory after President Mikheil Saakashvili gave the order to attack South Ossetia, a separatist republic with close ties to Russia.

Simonyan: All of the Western broadcasters gave only the Georgian side of the story. Saakashvili was featured on all the networks; his statements were broadcast on all the programs. According to the reports, Russia started the war when the country's troops bombed a busy market in the provincial town of Gori. We immediately sent our correspondents out there, who found no trace of either shootings or bombings.

Western broadcasters focused their entire coverage on the suffering of Georgian civilians. There was no mention of South Ossetians, meanwhile, who were suffering nightly artillery attacks at the hands of Saakashvili. It was pro-Georgian propaganda, pure and simple.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It wasn't that one-sided. SPIEGEL, for one, reported at an early stage that it was Saakashvili who had fired the first shot. A European Union committee came to the same conclusion.

Simonyan: Sure, afterwards! But how many people actually ended up reading the EU report? The majority of people to this day believe that Russia started the war totally unprovoked. The evil Russia pounces on poor little Georgia.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It is not uncommon to see Russia in the role of the aggressor.

Simonyan: Objection! Russia hadn't started a war with another country in 20 years. How many armed conflicts has America engaged in in the same period of time? How many wars has Europe taken part in?

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How do you explain Russia's negative image?

Simonyan: The West never got over the Cold War stereotype. One thing that only few journalists understand is that Russia started dissolving the Soviet Union of its own accord. We were the ones to realize that Communism was a failure. We understood that it was wrong to impose our will on other nations. We released the Eastern bloc into freedom. We are a different country today, one with a different mentality -- which is something that Western journalists sometimes find difficult to comprehend. You, for example, stated earlier that Russia was acting aggressively without backing it up with facts.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is Russia Today's goal to provide objective reporting? Or is it first and foremost about offering a perspective different from that of Western media?

Simonyan: Have you seen many examples of objectivity so far?

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Russia Today is striving for objectivity, certainly. Your network offers Syrian dictator Bashar Assad a platform for his political message.

Simonyan: There are people who refer to Assad's political opponents as the "democratic opposition." Even the rebels, however, have raped women and murdered children. Take Saakashvili, for example. He is held up as a hero by the BBC. For others, he represents an oppressor of freedom. There is no objectivity -- only approximations of the truth by as many different voices as possible.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The Russian opposition is rarely featured on your network, except as a target of smear campaigns. You even accused Russian blogger and dissident Rustem Adagamov of pedophilia without so much as a scrap of evidence.

Simonyan: Why did we give airtime to Adagamov? Because he was publicly positioning himself as a campaigner for justice.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The accusations leveled against him are based solely on statements coming from his ex-wife, who says that he sexually abused an underage girl in Norway many years ago. The authorities declined to bring charges against him due to a lack of evidence.

Simonyan: We didn't prosecute him; we merely broadcast a report. Would the German media refrain from giving coverage to a political activist accused of sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl? I spoke to the wife myself, and I certainly didn't get the impression that she was crazy.

 

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How did it come about that your network was the first to broadcast images of the arrest of a CIA spy in Moscow in May? How closely do you work with the authorities?

Simonyan: We received those images from an agency in the same way that every other Russian television network does. It wasn't exclusive material. We were simpler quicker to publish it than others.

The interview was conducted by Benjamin Bidder in Moscow .

===============================================

 

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/putin-fights-war-of-images-and-propaganda-with-russia-today-channel-a-916162.html

 

Since 2005, the Russian government has increased the channel's annual budget more than tenfold, from $30 million (€22.6 million) to over $300 million. Russia Today's budget covers the salaries of 2,500 employees and contractors worldwide, 100 in Washington alone. And the channel has no budget cuts to fear now that Putin has issued a decree forbidding his finance minister from taking any such steps.

 

The Moscow leadership views the funds going to the channel as money "well invested," says Natalya Timakova, the press attaché to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. "In addition, Russia Today is -- and I hope the Germans will forgive me for this remark -- significantly more modern than Deutsche Welle, for example, and it also has more money."

 

The government has also spent a lot of money on the new broadcasting center in northeast Moscow, which Russia Today moved into in May. The station, citing confidentiality requirements, isn't willing to quote an exact price tag. On the grounds of a former Soviet tea factory, the broadcaster is now creating programming in Arabic, English and Spanish. In 2009, it rebranded its English- and Spanish speaking divisions as simply "RT." The evening news is currently focused on the euro crisis, social protests in Portugal and the NSA surveillance scandal.

 

Russia Today sees itself as a champion of a global audience critical of the West. But it is also meant to amplify the self-doubts of Europeans and Americans who have been forced by recent events to wonder if their own countries -- like Russia and China -- are corrupt and in the grip of a pervasive intelligence apparatus.

 

In any case, the station has a rare knack for propaganda. The average age of the Russian editors is under 30, and almost everyone speaks fluent English. To spice up the news, directors sometimes use Hollywood-like special effects, such as a computer-animated tank that looks like it is rolling over the newscaster's feet or Israeli fighter jets that fly a virtual loop through the studio before dropping their bombs over a map of Syria. There is also a logic behind such visual effects, especially since the station sees itself as a sort of ministry of media defense for the Kremlin.

 

An Arms Race on the Airwaves

Margarita Simonyan is the woman who shaped Russia Today into Russia's most effective weapon in the battle for influencing the opinions of the global public. In her office on the eighth floor of its headquarters in Moscow, the editor-in-chief has Orthodox icons on her desk and a dozen flickering screens around it. Putin made Simonyan the head of the new station in 2005. At the time, she was only 25 and derided as an unknown reporter from the crowd of journalists that accompany the president at meetings.

 

Simonyan's mission is to prevent Russia from ever losing a war of images like the one it did in August 2008. At the time, Russian tanks were advancing into the southern Caucasus, stopping just short of Tbilisi, the capital of the small country of Georgia. The young Georgian president at the time, Mikheil Saakashvili -- eloquent and educated in the United States -- appeared on all channels to condemn Russia as an aggressor, even though he had provoked the war and was the first to order an invasion of the separatist republic of South Ossetia, which has close ties with Russia.

 

CNN showed images of destroyed buildings, allegedly taken after a Russian bomb strike on the Georgian provincial city of Gori. According to Russia Today, however, they were actually shots of the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali after a Georgian attack. "There is no objectivity," Simonyan says today, "only approximations of the truth by as many different voices as possible."

 

Mistrust of the domestic media is also greater than ever in the United States. CNN, for example, is struggling to cope with a massive loss of viewers. And sometimes US politicians make it particularly easy for the Russians to launch their attacks. When the plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to land in Vienna because US intelligence agencies believed that Snowden was on board, Abby Martin expressed what many were thinking: "Who the hell does Obama think he is?"

 

At the same time, Russia Today also uses a chaotic mixture of conspiracy theories and crude propaganda. On the program "The Truthseeker," the attack on the Boston Marathon, in which two ethnic Chechens killed three people with bombs in April, mutated into a US government conspiracy.

 

Peter Oliver, Russia Today's Berlin correspondent, has absurdly accused ZDF, one of two public German broadcasters, of engaging in bribery. Oliver claims that the network paid intellectuals to say positive things about the anti-Putin group *** Riot. As his star witness, he interviewed the editor-in-chief of Zuerst!, a monthly magazine published by German right-wing extremists.

 

Props and Propaganda

This is the company that legendary talk show host Larry King has joined. In 2000, King conducted the first major interview with Putin on Western television. Since then, the talk show legend has raved about the Russian politician's charisma. Putin, he says, has qualities that "change a room" and "a certain magnetism."

 

King's new show, "Politicking," has been on Russia Today since June. His guests have included former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Senator Joe Lieberman, two men who would normally never set foot in a Russian studio.

 

Abby Martin, the woman with the sledgehammer, recently had her new colleague King as a guest on her own show. At a certain point in the interview, he became critical of "pundits who are not journalists" who use guests as "a prop for their opinion." Perhaps the great Larry King still hasn't figured out that this is precisely what he is on Putin's new station: a prop and a trophy.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan