Who owns russian tv

And during the Beslan school massacre, in which more than children, teachers and parents were slain by Chechen terrorists after a botched Russian army rescue mission, Channel One cut to a Brazilian soap opera. The names of dissidents, like Navalny, were never uttered on-air, no matter how popular they became.

In a interview with the Financial Times, Ernst articulated a philosophy that combined a belief in the inherent primacy of the state with a cynicism about the value of journalistic truth. Later, he would expound more cynical views. Truth, therefore, is unattainable, and one angle is as valid as another. But by , reality was catching up to Putin. To the west, noisy demonstrators in Kyiv occupied Maidan square and drove a Putin ally from power.

The rapturously received opening ceremony changed the narrative. In the Putin era, London has become the go-to center for the Russian elite: the place for them to party, to invest, to send their kids to school.

According to academic estimates, the richest Russians, by , held as much in offshore centers such as London as all Russian households owned in Russia. K press showed how the partnership helped structure trusts for Kremlin-linked Russian nationals. Tulloch used Trident Trust to arrange for their assets to be transferred to shell companies — like the thousands of Russian-owned companies already in the files — registered in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus and the Bahamas, all secrecy jurisdictions.

On Feb. The name evokes a kind of traditional old-Moscow architecture largely destroyed by a corruption-fueled property boom in the s. But many of the cinemas were classics of later Soviet architecture, and together they covered more than 90 acres of prime Moscow land.

An anti-corruption activist cried foul. Dmitry Baranovsky, an independent city council member representing northeast Moscow, filed a complaint with the local competition authority.

The city government told the competition authority it had repeatedly tried to sell the cinemas in smaller lots. Scooping up the theaters for the minimum price was a Russian company, Edisonenergo LLC, affiliated with an established Moscow development company.

The development company was headed by two brothers, Grigory and Mikhail Pecherskiy, who had built malls in their hometown of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. Grigory Pecherskiy, a regular on the Moscow art scene with long curly hair and thick framed glasses, was the public face of the project. Sanctioned by the U. The bank has denied that it is controlled by the Kremlin.

The secrecy surrounding other partners in the mega-project touched off a flurry of speculation that they included Kremlin-linked elites. Video International ceased operations in In the same interview, with the leading Russian business newspaper Kommersant, Grigory Pecherskiy was also asked if the partners included Ernst. The Pandora Papers show the public-facing Pecherskiy brothers were actually minority partners in the project.

The records show that the Pecherskiy affiliated company that won the auction, Edisonenergo LLC, was owned by a Cypriot-registered company, which was in turn owned by two other shell companies.

One of the owners, Xelio Invest Ltd, leads to a dead end; the sole shareholder listed in Cyprus records is yet another firm, this one registered in the BVI, where public records do not disclose the true owners. Its owners are revealed by the Pandora Papers. And Trident was to maintain those records at its offices instead. Some media have complied, even amid fears that the labels would scare off advertisers. At least one designated Russian news outlet has closed.

Meduza has resorted to crowdfunding to continue operating. In defending the law, Russian officials have frequently drawn a parallel to the American foreign agent law, which dates back to the s. He asserted, falsely, that RT and Sputnik had been forced to label their content in the United States. But we will not respond in order to take revenge, simply to bring our relations in a given area to parity.

Some social media networks, like Google-owned YouTube, where RT has a huge following, began in to label videos produced by RT and other Russian government-funded media. Other foreign-funded media that have been required to register under the U.

Mike Eckel is a senior correspondent in Prague, where he reports on developments in Russia, Ukraine, and around the former Soviet Union, as well as news involving cybercrime and money laundering. Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Turkmenistan Uzbekistan. Armenia Azerbaijan Georgia.

Belarus Ukraine. Follow Us. Previous Next. Similar to this, one of our participants said that the government appoints an advisory team to supervise the hiring of journalists at RT in Moscow. In addition, all of our respondents have confirmed that the top managers and senior editors at all RT bureaus are Russians.

Participant18 noticed that:. The higher up the ranks, the more Russians it goes. So, senior producers were Russian and all the bosses. Down the line, they will be less Russian and more British, or Australians. Participant18, At the RT newsroom in Moscow, there are several news teams and each team is supervised by two editors: a Russian editor who is responsible for the political editing of the stories and a foreign editor who ensures that the writing is at a professional level.

Note : A circle represents story development, boxes represent the decision-makers and the gatekeepers at the channel, and thin arrows represent the sequence in which the story follows.

Dotted lines refer to a possible intervention from the government or the editor-in-chief to take a story off-air. Following the morning meeting, news is assigned by the editors to the journalists. The assignments vary according to the topic.

When it came to assigning politically sensitive stories, foreign journalists are usually avoided for such tasks. Participant13 stated:. I am a foreigner, so they would not give me the sensitive stories. The sensitive stories were done by people who understand the line that needs to be taken. Participant13, For instance, during the Georgia conflict in , Participant1 said that they sent Russian journalists rather than British journalists to cover this conflict.

This aforementioned assignment strategy is followed at RT International in Moscow. Participants who worked in foreign bureaus did not have an agreement on whether the stories are directly assigned to them or that they were able to pitch their own stories. What we get was a short word document that has a list of the stories that a senior Russian manager felt that we should cover.

This is what we used to dictate our news agenda … this list was only sent to the news editor and it was not sent to producers. However, a few other respondents, who worked for the foreign bureaus, said that they used to propose stories that are then approved only if they fitted the anti-West narrative of RT. Participant17 said:. The individual journalists who work for RT … they pitch the story.

Whoever is in charge is more than happy to confirm if that story makes the US and the UK look bad. Participant17, After journalists write a script, they need to get it approved by their editor. Most of our respondents who were based in the Moscow office said that the Russian editor would approve the script and the British editor would check the script to ensure it was professionally styled:.

The UK [editor] would look at my script and may amend it or something, and then it goes to the Russian editor and this is where it got screened. Participant2, One of the respondents said that in the foreign bureaus, scripts are sent to the Moscow office for approval.

However, they believe that this process is necessary to ensure the reliability of scripts and to avoid unintended mistakes. However, Participant6 said that none of the reports produced for RT UK, for example, needed to be approved by the headquarters. However, they added that reports made for RT international must be approved by the Moscow office. After a script is approved, the story is produced and broadcasted.

However, there were a few incidents when the government and the Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan played a last-minute top-down gatekeeping role by taking down stories after they had been broadcasted. For example, Participant3 said that when RT Arabic managed to interview the Libyan president Muammar Al Gaddafi when he was hiding from the opposition in , RT broadcasted the interview and then officials ordered that no further broadcasts should be aired until the political position of Russia was confirmed.

Self-censorship is one of the main defining features of the Soviet media and the current Russian media system Becker, ; Oates, As such, RT is no different; journalists at RT have turned into gatekeepers. Most of our participants stated that they self-censor while pitching stories or writing scripts.

Participant6 provided a summary of this phenomenon by stating that:. Everyone is doing self-censorship. Even when you are pitching stories you will say to yourself, they are never going to go with that, so I am not going to bother to pitch it. This self-censorship sometimes replaces the structured process of gatekeeping at RT.

Participant18, who worked in a foreign bureau, stated that:. I had a very little control from Moscow. I ran 10 stories a day with no direction and it was up to me. However, I knew what the Russians wanted so I was self-censoring.

Unlike the current Russian media system that relies on direct punishment in the sort of harassment or violence Oates, , firing journalists who do not abide by RT policies were found to be uncommon. Our participants discussed incidents when they refused to cover certain stories but their future at RT was not affected. In some situations, mild sanctions were employed, but not the termination of contracts.

For example, when one of the participants refused to produce stories that they perceived as extreme and against their political opinions, the management took away the team they had been supervising as a warning.

Alternatively, the emphasis is upon loyalty to the channel, such that it has a significant bearing on career progression. Journalists who are considered particularly loyal to RT occupy senior positions. In other words, self-censorship in RT is not driven by fear of punishment but rather fear of losing the incentives the channel offer to those who follow its line.

To fulfill its mission, RT management has drawn heavily from the types of practices of Soviet media controls that Siebert et al. Journalists at RT continue to be subject to Soviet-style socialization and self-censoring, through an awareness of the messages that Russian senior editors want to put forward for broadcast.

Non-Russian journalists often joined and stayed with RT for career progression, suggesting that other institutions would refuse to hire them if they were to leave the channel. Source : Based on the work of Siebert et al. By contrast, Russian journalists are more likely to articulate a sense of pride in serving their country by working for RT.

It, therefore, makes sense that interviewees would speak of RTs management intending to replace foreign journalists with Russian journalists. In addition to Russianizing the institution, other controls were also imposed. The news assignment strategy maintained an anti-West agenda in the channel and unified the critical representation of Western governments across all RT languages.

In that sense, if there is a story in the U. Whenever Russia is accused of a human rights violation, RT broadcasts stories that suggest that there are comparable cases in the United States. What we can ask is who actually do watch RT? Our participants stated that they were writing and broadcasting to audiences with pre-existing anti-Western and antiestablishment beliefs. The channel gives this type of audience a voice, news to amplify, and a source that reinforces their beliefs and political agendas.

However, our participants doubted that RT has the power to change the public opinion in a broader sense. Giving the perception that RT could possibly break democracies enables it more power and eventually makes it eligible for more state funding. RT alone cannot break Western democracies; it is a single apparatus among many others that are used to meddle in Western politics.

The success of the Russian information warfare depends largely on the network of different sources, including media outlets, social media bots, trolls, and cyberattacks Richter, RT, however, is more likely to be held accountable because, unlike other covert strategies, for being a public-facing broadcaster that must adhere to follow Communication Acts and media regulations where it operates.

This article advances the scholarship of news organizational behavior, information warfare, and international broadcasting. We provide a framework to examine state-backed media operations by understanding their historical and domestic contexts.

By studying RT, we realized how important it is to contextualize state-backed media within the broader media ecosystem that shaped their evolution. Although some outlets—especially those backed by nondemocratic states—might share some elements and promote similar narratives, the controls they inherit are shaped by unique domestic sociopolitical factors that evolve and change their editorial structure.

The authors acknowledge and appreciate the participants who were generous with their time and were able to share their experiences with us. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.

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