14 Nov, 2014 17:54

Fact fails: UK 'journalism' on RT

In 2005, at 25 years old, Margarita was named Editor-in-Chief of RT, the first Russian round-the-clock English-language news channel. Later on, after the launch of RT in Arabic (Rusiya Al-Yaum) and RT in Spanish, she became Editor-in-Chief of the whole multilingual television news network. Margarita Simonyan is also the first Vice-President of Russia’s National Association of TV and Radio Broadcasters (NAT).

In an almost beautiful bit of irony, those who are the first to accuse RT of shoddy journalism and propagating conspiracy theories are practicing exactly what they supposedly preach against.

First comes out The Guardian article quoting some astronomical numbers as RT’s budget – allegedly the largest of Russian public broadcasters. Their source? Russian media experts Pussy Riot.

Screenshot from http://www.theguardian.com/

The Guardian, evidently happy to continue spreading the idea of RT as a big bad menace, doesn’t bother challenging this figure, pulled out of thin air, despite plenty of publicly available information, including Ministry of Finance filings, instead quoting the number as fact.

Then, Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship gleefully “exposes” a major RT deception about our recent international “Second Opinion”ad campaign. You see, this gentleman just discovered an RT ad poster featuring George W. Bush near his house – despite RT’s audacious claims that their ad campaign was rejected by UK platforms and had to be replaced with a “REDACTED” version. What lies! What scandal! What yet another conspiratorial PR stunt from RT!

If only Mr. Reidy had bothered to actually read RT’s widely circulated – and posted on our website press release about the UK leg of our campaign, he, hopefully, would have noticed this bit of information: “The campaign is also going live in the UK market with wild postings of uncensored images in more than 100 London locations, including spots in Canary Wharf, City of London....” etc., including, it seems, Reidy’s neighbourhood.

I don't really understand the message here
A photo posted by Padraig Reidy (@padraig.reidy) on Nov 11, 2014 at 4:43am PST

The same press release also detailed the specific platforms on which the original posters had to be replaced with the redacted ones.

These redacted posters are appearing on those platforms throughout London, and it is no great mystery which vendors could not post the originals – per UK code all the details are printed on the physical platforms themselves. All it takes to get to the bottom of this riveting mystery is a bit of legwork.

That’s how journalism is done.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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