What Is RT?

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/world/europe/what-is-rt.html

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LONDON — Created 12 years ago by Vladimir Putin as Russia’s answer to soft-power television stations like France 24 and the BBC, RT began with lots of features about Russian life, from pelmeni dumplings to bikini skiing. But the audience response was tepid, and RT’s messaging hardened up considerably during the 2008 Georgian War and then the 2014 Ukrainian uprising, with the consequent Russian annexation of Crimea and military support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

As a broadcaster monitored by state authorities — in Britain, by Ofcom, and soon in France, where RT expects to begin broadcasting by the end of this year — “we are regulated by them as a reputable news organization,” said RT’s London bureau chief, Nikolay A. Bogachikhin. While in the last three years, Ofcom has found several instances of insufficient impartiality on stories of interest to Moscow, like Ukraine, Syria and Turkey, RT has always cooperated, he said. And the British authorities have never found RT guilty of faking or making up news, in breach of the requirement for “due accuracy,” he said.

RT is a minor player in Britain. For the week of Feb. 13 to 19, for example, the British Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board showed RT drawing an average weekly viewership of 643,000 people out of a total British viewing audience of 55.2 million, or about 1.08 percent. Daily, the viewership is about 187,000 people, or 0.31 percent of the total audience.

RT also broadcasts in Spanish and Arabic, and is available online in Russian, German and French. Broadcasting in French was delayed by Russia’s budget troubles and will not begin until long after the French presidential election.

The French website currently has 10 employees, said Anna Belkina, RT’s head of communications in Moscow, and plans to hire more as broadcast approaches. “We think there’s a large demand there,” she said. Visits to the French website doubled in 2016, she said, the fastest growth of RT’s six foreign language sites. The six websites together, she said, get 120 million monthly visits.

According to RT, it is available to 700 million viewers worldwide in more than 100 countries, though it is not clear how many people watch and for how long. RT points to an Ipsos study in November 2015, done for the channel’s 10th anniversary, that found that 70 million individuals watched some RT television weekly (36 million in Europe and eight million in the United States), and about 35 million people watched some RT daily.

RT’s 2017 budget, Ms. Belkina said, is 18.7 billion rubles, about $323 million, including funds for the French broadcast operation.