‘Now do you see the long arm of RT?’ Editor-in-chief mocks claims that RT hacked C-SPAN
RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan criticized the mainstream media for a “hysterical” reaction to a broadcasting error on Thursday, when the RT transmission suddenly cut into a live feed of C-SPAN, the American public service network.
C-SPAN said that the incident was the result of an “internal routing error,” but not before dozens of media outlets reported that the channel may have been “hacked,” and made links to recent mentions of RT in the ODNI report on Russia’s influence in the past US presidential election. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who was addressing the House of Representatives when the 10-minute interruption occurred also called the incident “odd” and “strange.”
“I am starting to believe that Russian hackers have infiltrated the heads of the US establishment,” Simonyan told RIA news agency. “C-SPAN itself has already said the feed interruption was an internal malfunction, but mainstream media is still going into hysterics saying we hacked them. Our newsroom ran out of popcorn watching this unfold.”
“Now do you see the long arm of RT?” Simonyan, who has overseen RT since it began broadcasting in 2005, posted on her Russian-language Twitter.
A seven-page annex in the declassified version of the ODNI report were dedicated exclusively to the growing influence of RT, focusing on its coverage of issues as diverse as Occupy Wall Street and fracking, as well as accusing it of one-sided anti-Hillary Clinton coverage of the 2016 election.
