By Sam HUSSEINI

The closure of RT America follows effective censorship of the channel. The ultimate decision to close was made following a cut off of service by DirecTV and Roku. Big Tech firms were also increasingly targeting RT. Reuters reported: “Tech companies in recent days have moved to restrict Russian state-controlled media including RT and Sputnik in response to requests from governments and calls to prevent the spread of Russia propaganda.”

Many will try to argue that the developments in the U.S. are completely different from the European Commission recently banned RT and Sputnik.

But it more clearly highlights the congruence of government and major corporate agendas. And indeed, as with Big Tech censorship generally, sometimes the collusion is outright, see my interview last year with Nadine Strossen, former head of the ACLU. Contrary to the common mantra that Big Tech platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter get to decide what content they want, Strossen argues “Private sector actors are directly bound by constitutional norms, including the First Amendment” if they are being coerced by or colluding with the government.

And direct censorship has been done by the U.S. government. For example, in 2020, the Trump administration seized the internet domain for the American Herald Tribune, claiming it was controlled by Iran. The following year, the Biden administration seized the domains for Press TV and over 30 others on similar grounds. The mechanism for this was sanctions that were placed on Iran — thus, sweeping sanctions can be used effectively as an instrument against the First Amendment.

Such compulsions go back. In 2008, a New York man who was trying to make Al-Manar, a TV station backed by Hezbollah in Lebanon, available to people in the U.S. was sentenced to at least five years in prison. There were at best minimal efforts to oppose this on First Amendment grounds.

RT America Was Different

But RT America was different from many of these in that RT America reached a lot of people. I remember chatting with an elderly man several years ago in rural Maryland who I happened to strike up a conversation with in a store. After our talk turned to politics, he excitedly told me about this great outlet he was watching for news — RT.

In all honesty, I was surprised at first when I saw RT’s substantial operations in D.C. The U.S. government had shut down Press TV’s offices in D.C. But there RT’s offices were — rows and rows of producers and other workers.

I began to suspect that RT and RT America were allowed to blossom in part because a pretext could always be found to pull the plug on them.

I worked for a time in 2007 with The Real News, then based in Toronto, which aimed to be a genuinely independent media outlet. The Real News had relatively modest funding but a lot of promise.

I thought The Real News at that point was a terribly important project — what could challenge the power of the U.S. Establishment more than an independent, vibrant 24/7 media outlet?

But part of a strategy of preventing the emergence of a global independent media outlet might have included allowing the emergence of national outlets which tapped into dissent and discontent in the U.S., but which could easily have the rug pulled out from under them at any time chosen by the U.S. Establishment. So, did RT end up effectively syphoning off the viewers that could have helped build up The Real News?

Censorship graffiti, Budapest, Hungary. (Cory Doctorow, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

In January of 2021, in explaining the lack of a vibrant independent media outlet in the U.S., I wrote:

“The possibility of something emerging was ironically hindered by other nationalist outlets. After Al Jazeera dudded out, instead of people in the U.S. and elsewhere trying to build something, people turned to RT etc with obvious problems, I *suspect that RT was allowed to become entrenched by the U.S. establishment for exactly this reason — its rise and funding helped preclude people from building a grassroots network and RT could obviously be dismissed when the establishment chose to do so.”

Given the secretive nature of U.S. government institutions, it’s virtually impossible to show that that’s what happened, but regardless, clearly the U.S. Establishment is now gunning for RT.

To be clear, beyond the obvious limitations, I have thought that RT, perhaps because of its governmental backing, was at times quite limited in its critique of U.S. government policy, see my piece “Stated Goals vs Actual Goals: ‘CrossTalk’ Lives Up to Its Name” from 2015. I end that piece:

“We have these media outlets of various nationalities — RT for Russia, France 24 for France, CNN for the U.S. establishment, Fox for the U.S. establishment rightwing, MSNBC for U.S. establishment corporate liberals, Al-Jazeerafor Qatar, Al-Arabia for Saudi Arabia, CCTV for China, etc.

“They all foster shallowness and ultimately prize hacks over real journalists.

“We desperately need a global, real network dedicated to real facts and meaningful dialogue between various viewpoints.”

So, ironically, there may be a silver lining: The demise of RT America might in fact be an opportunity to build the global media structures we so desperately need.

Such an attempt, if it were even mildly successful, will likely face brutal attack.

In 2010, following pressure from then Sen. Joe Lieberman, VISA, Mastercard and Amazon pulled the plug on WikiLeaks, which had become a major sensation based on the “Collateral Murder” video.

When “Collateral Murder” came out, one could see the promise of WikiLeaks, getting direct support from millions around the world and developing a new type of journalism that could powerfully hold governments and corporations to account. But of course, WikiLeaks has been savagely attacked, such that most of their resources had to be directed at defending their founder. Still, the assaults on WikiLeaks have come at a cost for the U.S. government, exposing their tortured onslaughts on the group.

Given the seemingly ever more demented state of affairs, the lack of focus on the facts that people need to know, the manipulation of information by Big Tech, the lack of meaningful dialogue or debate on large media outlets and so many other obstacles, the need for an independent, global media outlet is more urgent than ever.

consortiumnews.com

The EU ban on RT and Sputnik is simply wrong and the thinking behind it draconian. What more proof do you need to see that the EU is an-anti democratic elite which hates accountability. Even in the Ukraine.

Is media playing a role in the war in Ukraine? And if so, by helping one side, or by even informing a wider international public of the important factors? Or is it feeding the hatred, misinforming the elites and decision makers and pushing Russia and Ukraine further away from any possibility of a ceasefire and talks?

I was recently taken aback by the near comical statement by the EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell who said that RT and Sputnik are to be banned from the EU bloc. His reasons, which RT actually broadcasted to its credit, were because “they were champions of information manipulation”.

The irony here is mind-blowing, given that Borrell himself is really a champion of disinformation and manipulating media and knows what he’s talking about when he uses phrases like that or indeed “full-out propaganda war”. In reality, any journalist who has worked in Brussels, accredited to the EU, will tell you that the PR efforts of the EU institutions – in particular the European Commission – amount to a colossal media manipulation which culminates in fake news being pumped out to the masses across the bloc each day, sexing up the relevance and status of the EU as journalists essentially replicate information which is spoon-fed to them and never question its validity.

Borrell’s statement is a triumph of both irony and cheek. The nerve of this socialist politician who hardly has a squeaky clean past himself in his own country, is pretty amazing given that the EU itself spends billions on subsidising production costs of TV journalists and their teams in Brussels to report on the minutia of day-to-day activities in the EU institutions forcing journalists not to ‘bite the hand which feeds them’ when it comes to their reporting.

Moreover, in recent years, with more and more MEPs from far right or populist parties swelling the ranks in the European Parliament, the same institution voted to find more money to pump into the die-hard Europhile news agencies willing to go the extra mile in copy/pasting the tome of EU fodder fed to the journalists each day. There was actually a report in 2016, which was voted on and backed, which became the framework to set up a secret anti-Russia media unit, made up of barking mad MEPs, obsessed with Russia. It’s unclear just how much money though was allocated to it, or even what it specifically does, although it is the author’s view that it funds internet trolls to “inform” the gullible public through the comments sections of online articles and support outlets themselves.

Perhaps more worrying that this obsession with RT is how MEPs have voiced their own opinions through “own initiative reports” to actually fund EU-friendly media outlets with cash outright. The parliament has not officially backed this, but one could argue that the 2016 report was a signal to pour more illicit money the way of broadcasters with production facilities and one has to ask whether the Russia “watchdog” which the MEPs did set up doesn’t do this already. The EU, which claims to be a leader of human rights, liberties and democratic values, is so corrupt and backward that it won’t reveal any of the details about the program.

But what does the move by the EU say about both the war in Ukraine and the attitude of the EU towards how its citizens should be informed (if at all)? I would argue that the West in general is so afraid of its own elites losing their grip of power that they believe an obliteration of any media coverage which doesn’t correspond with their narrative is the only recourse they are able to take. Borrell’s statement showed the EU to be in a particularly weak position, if it needs to stoop so low and try and destroy RT’s coverage and perspective on Ukraine. Borrell wants the EU to control minds, in exactly the way he accuses Putin and being the “Thought Police” on Ukraine, via media manipulation, is how he seeks to achieve this.

We have seen this already happen in Syria. Both the East and West’s governments and leaders found great solace and comfort in a polarised media coverage system which didn’t encourage journalists to “cross a line” to the other side to balance their reporting. The result is that either side’s reporting is tainted at best and vociferously biased at worst. But at least readers could look at both side’s coverage and try and fill in the spaces themselves – hardly an ideal way of reporting or reading about complicated conflicts, but better than nothing.

The decision to ban RT and Sputnik is the “nothing” model which Borrell wants. His goal is to whitewash out any other views whatsoever for European citizens who are searching for facts and want to examine the version of events from the other side. To argue that RT’s perspective is distorted because it represents the Kremlin is stupid, naive and hypocritical; the State Department has been reporting on wars with a fervent U.S. bias for decades, just as the BBC has a British angle, or F24 a French one, or even the Germans at DW. So what that the Russians are biased? The West, by banning them, shows us all how afraid and ineffective such institutions like the European Commission are as if they are to lower themselves to those they supposedly mock and despise, does that not make them the same? For the EU to take this position just states the obvious. It wants to manipulate the news for its own political agenda and it has learnt in Brussels that if you stamp out all descent, you can manipulate a phalanx of journalists to report your views, ideas and bigoted opinions and basically make up the news wholesale. Since 2005, when German investigative journalist Hans-Martin Tillack was arrested – yes, arrested – by Belgian police on dubious charges, simply because he rejected the model which nearly all adhere to on reporting on the EU, not one journalist has assiduously reported on the EU and its corruption ever since.

The model of “disinformation” which Borrell outlines when talks about Russia, is precisely, to the letter, the modus operandi which Brussels has itself.

The EU is, in a nutshell, a champion of fake news and it reacting this way towards RT is a reaction from a losing team, possessed with insecurity, jealousy and petulance and one that hates accountability as much as it hates the truth. So typically EU. Keep a keen eye for EU-organised press junkets direct from Brussels, which I’m sure are going to kick off soon. But don’t expect on air declarations by journalists that their trip was entirely funded by the EU, probably from the secret Russian “watchdog” unit.

The letter makes all the usual points about a “free flow of reliable news and information” in the middle of a growing international emergency. And however clichéd, such sentiments are correct since access to the broadest possible sources of information is indeed essential if the world is to make it through the crisis.

But the letter would have been a lot more convincing if the three papers had spoken up on Mar. 2 when the Trump administration moved to expel sixty Chinese journalists working for five news organizations that the White House regards as little more than state propaganda outfits.

Moreover, they’d be on even firmer footing if they had not actively cheered on the most dangerous anti-media effort of all, the U.S. crackdown on the TV news service RT, formerly known as Russia Today, that began in November 2017.

The crackdown on RT was in some ways even worse than McCarthyism since the latter was at least about something real and important, which is to say a Communist movement that controlled roughly forty percent of the global population and was pressing in on capitalism from every side. If the ruling class seemed spooked, it was facing a challenge of unprecedented dimensions.

But the threat this time around was about something entirely made up, i.e. the belief that Russia had supposedly used various dark arts to trick Americans into voting for Trump. The nonsense began in January 2017 when the CIA, NSA, and FBI “assessed” that Vladimir Putin had interfered in the previous year’s election in order “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability” and, in the process, boost Trump. The report was entirely devoid of evidence, yet the press took it as gospel. Even worse, the intelligence report included a seven-page annex accusing RT of engaging in “criticism of U.S. and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent,” running “numerous reports on alleged U.S. election fraud and voting machine vulnerabilities,” contending that U.S. election results cannot be trusted and do not reflect the popular will,” and hosting third-party candidates who contend that “the U.S. two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’”

Imagine – a foreign news service daring to suggest that U.S. politics were flawed! If papers like the Times or Post had the slightest inkling of self-respect, they would have laughed themselves silly over such hyper-sensitivity and told the CIA to grow a thicker skin. But they didn’t. Instead, they worked themselves up into ever greater levels of indignation. Within a few months, the New York Times was warning that “if there is any unifying character to RT, it is a deep skepticism of Western and American narratives of the world and a fundamental defensiveness about Russia and Mr. Putin” and that, thanks to snazzy graphics and snappy repartee, the network had put together “the most effective propaganda operation of the 21st century so far, one that thrives in the feverish political climates that have descended on many Western publics.”

Of course, one might observe that outlets like CNN and MSNBC are characterized by a deep skepticism of Russian narratives, so what’s the difference? But that wouldn’t be fair since everyone knows that America is right and Russia wrong and that any comparison between the two is automatically invalid, isn’t it?

Not to be outdone, the Washington Post – official slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness” – ran not one but two op-eds (here and here) calling on the federal government to require RT to register as a foreign agent, a step the Trump administration would dutifully take just two months later.

So the big two turned out to be more aggressive than the Trump administration in reducing journalistic diversity and using the power of the state to undermine a foreign competitor. Finally, just a month ago, the Times ran a front-page article declaring – queue the ominous music – that Radio Sputnik, RT’s sister outlet, had begun “broadcasting on three Kansas City-area radio stations during prime drive time.” Horror of horrors, the station was bombarding Missourians with Russki propaganda criticizing impeachment, the media, and the U.S. political system in general and informing that, in the words of one Sputnik host, that “the masses of poor and working people don’t have access to even the most essential things.”

Where did Radio Sputnik come up with such a notion? Doesn’t everyone know that perfect equality reigns in the United States and that anyone who says otherwise must be working for a foreign power?

In fact, while America never tires of touting its devotion to the First Amendment, it loses control when a foreign news service turns tables by engaging in journalism that is cheeky and irreverent. It wants a free press, which is to say one that is free to repeat over and over again how perfectly wonderful America really is. But it does not believe in a free press that allows foreigners to say the contrary.

For a number of years now, I have been periodically interviewed as a source or a commentator on news programs and as an occasional panel participant on RT TV, the Russian government-funded English-language television station. For the past year, I’ve been paid a small amount for my work.

Effective Monday, November 13, something changed, though. RT suddenly became a“registered foreign agent.” The Russian government-funded news service, which has its headquarters in Washington, with bureaus in several other US cities, filed the required papers under protest — the only foreign news service operating here that is required to do so — and said it intends to sue. Russia is also retaliating and will be requiring some US news organizations operating in Russia, including Voice of America, to similarly register as foreign agents.

This means that as of two weeks ago, I have been working, at least on a minimal basis of perhaps one short 5-10-minute interview per week, for a “foreign agent.”

The US government, a lot of heavy-breathing members of Congress, and the bulk of the corporate media in the US at this point are suggesting that journalists like me are at best “useful idiots” helping to promote Russian propaganda in the US — propaganda that our government claims is designed to sow discord among the citizenry and to undermine support for American democracy. Why, RT has been accused of such heinous behavior, according to former National Security Director James Clapper “promoting a particular point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights, etc.”

Scary stuff, huh? He even accused RT of  airing debates by third-party presidential candidates during the 2016 campaign — something the corporate media for years has dutifully refused to do in what I guess they consider a patriotic defense of our two-party system.

Pathetic as the case against RT may be, I’ve been the butt of jokes by liberal friends who say that I’m a “Russian agent” because they’ve bought the spurious argument that Russia “hacked” the US election and delivered us a Trump presidency. I wonder though, how many such Americans have ever actually watched RT-TV. I suspect it’s very few. First off, it’s not that easy to see it on your TV, since most cable and fiber-optic television bundlers leave it out o.f their packages, as they also leave out the Al Jazeera English Channel option, in response to pressure from the government. If they did watch it — which you can and should do at least to check it out at RT-America and at RT.com (the international edition) — they would find shows hosted not by Russians, but by American journalists, many of them well known names like Larry King, Ed Schultz, Jesse Ventura and Chris Hedges. A number of these people are working for RT because they were either sacked by US media outlets, like Schultz at MSNBC or had a planned program cancelled like Ventura, also at MSNBC, or left in disgust like Chris Hedges, a veteran war reporter for the NY Times.

For myself, I have agreed to be a go-to expert source for RT because over the years, after once upon a time being called to be on shows like MSNBC, CBS News and NPR programs, I don’t get those calls anymore. It’s not that I or my journalism have changed, but that the corporate media have grown flaccid and afraid of controversy. If I want to talk on TV about a story like the one I broke — based upon documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act — showing that the Houston FBI office learned or knew of a well-developed plot to conduct “intelligence” on the Houston Occupy movement, identify the leaders, and then “if deemed necessary” to assassinate them using “suppressed” sniper rifle fire, or the story I broke based upon information obtained from a county coroner suggesting that a potential key witness in the case of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was actually murdered by an FBI agent in Orlando, I have to talk about it on RT. No US corporate news organization will touch such stories. Same thing if I want to make the point that the US has been providing funding, arms and training in Syria to anti-Assad fighters of Al Nusra, an affiliate of the Al Qaeda organization. You simply cannot say such undeniably factually correct things on a US news program, but you can say them on RT.

I’m under no illusion that RT is some sainted news organization that doesn’t have a pro-Russian point of view. Of course it does, just as the government-funded BBC has a pro-British perspective. But I also well know (having worked for years as a staff journalist for major US news organizations), that every corporate news outlet in the US has a pro-US point of view, and that particularly where the story involves both US and Russian interests, as in the case of Ukraine and Syria, the whole truth is not being told by any Russian or US news organization. If I can get a bit of the truth out by talking on RT to counter propaganda and untruths in the US media, so much the better. I would hope that American viewers would have the sense to know that if they watch the news on RT, they are getting a pro-Russian perspective and to take what they see and hear with a grain of salt, just as I would hope they would consider American news reports with the same degree of skepticism (that may be optimistic!).

In any event, the reality is that I am no more an “agent of Russia” for agreeing to be interviewed (for a fee) on Russian TV than I would be an agent of Britain for being interviewed on the BBC or for having an article published in the New York Times or Business Week — both publications I’ve written for, the latter on retainer for five years.

Never once have I had an interview on RT edited to make it appear I’m saying something I didn’t say, and never once have I said something on RT that I didn’t firmly believe to be true based upon my own research.

When the issue of the US government requiring RT America to file as a foreign agent came up, my wife told me she thought by continuing to contribute comments to the station I was probably hoping to get called before some Congressional committee, ala the 1950s House un-American Activities Committee with its hearings on Communist subversion. I told her she was right: I would love nothing better than to get questioned about my work by some Congressional panel, and would be happy to have rabid anti-Russian Congressmembers view any one of my RT clips and point to anywhere that I was pushing Russian propaganda.

Example:  Here is a lengthy interview I did on RT International on the issue of “fake news” allegations and concerns expressed by Facebook’s head of security about calls for the company to block alleged fake news its news feeds. I’m betting it’s not a perspective you’ve heard on your evening news, but I certainly stand by the points I’m making, and am not purveying any Russian propaganda, but let the viewer can be the judge.

What’s really going on here with this “foreign agent” registration requirement is a kind of paternalistic censorship, much like those North Korean TV sets that didn’t include settings on their channel selection dials for South Korean stations. It should concern every American who believes in the importance of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press, which after all is not just freedom for the US-based press, but also freedom of Americans’ right to read, listen to and view information from any source, and to make their own judgements about its veracity or logic. When the government, as it is doing here in making efforts to block RT from the internet and from cable and fios TV, and in requiring it to register as a foreign agent, thereby implicitly and perhaps eventually actually threatening those journalists like me who continue to contribute to or work for the Russian-funded station, it is deciding what is safe, and what is not safe for Americans to read, listen to or view. That is starting down a very dangerous slope; a slope that inevitably will lead to much broader censorship and self-censorship of media in the US.

Only a year ago, the Washington Post published a shabbily sourced and, frankly, libelous lead story based upon the “research” of a mysterious organization called PropOrNot, whose funding and personnel were left unidentified, that claimed to have uncovered a massive Russian propaganda campaign in the US. This outfit, most likely the work of the Pentagon’s cyber command, claimed that some 200 online news sites in the US, including RT, but also US sites like CounterPunch, antiwar.com, Truthout, Naked Capitalism and the Black Agenda Report, are either active promoters of Russian propaganda or “useful idiots” — a term tossed around wildly during the McCarthy period to demonize people said to perhaps ignorantly back a Communist agenda of subversion.

The thing is, despite claims by rabid members of Congress and in the military industrial complex that Russia has aggressive aims of conquest in Europe, Russia isn’t even a US enemy. In reality, Russia is a major trading partner of Europe’s and is a major supplier of European natural gas, the US and Russia have been fighting on the same side in Syria, the Russians are the ones who fly our astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and US corporate investment in Russia, despite several years of increasing sanctions levied over the issue of Ukraine and Crimea, is enormous. In other words, from the point of view of a journalist appearing on an RT program, it is no different from appearing on a BBC or Deutsche Welle, or, for that matter, on a CCTV program in China.

Meanwhile, if we want to really look for foreign agents at work in our country, look no further than the CEOs, presidents and board chairs of some of American’s largest companies.   Collectively, the S&P 500 includes companies 48% of whose revenues are earned abroad. Since some, like the big telecom firms, earn almost no revenues abroad, it’s not surprising that some of the biggest corporations on the list are earning the bulk of their revenues and profits overseas (and are booking their profits there too in order to avoid US corporate taxes).

Take seven of the biggest:  In  the case of Apple, 62.3% of its 2016 revenues of $306 billion was earned abroad. For Qualcom, the figure was a whopping 98.6%$ of its $30.6 billion in 2016 revenues. Intel, meanwhile, “only” earned 82% of its $31.7 billion in 2016 revenues from abroad.  ExxonMobil, headed by Rex Tillerson until he was named President Trump’s secretary of state, earned $67.3% of its 2016 revenues from abroad (and has been seeking a deal to license close to $1 trillion in gas an oil reserves off Russia’s Siberian coast in the Arctic Ocean), while Johnson & Johnson earned 5.2% of its 2016 revenues abroad. General Electric meanwhile, doesn’t just earn the bulk of its revenues abroad — about 53% in 2016. As of the end of 2014, 55% of its workforce of 305,000 was located abroad — a number that continues to rise. And yet President Obama, without a hint of irony, named GE’s then CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, to be a “jobs czar” for the administration in 2009 (a year later, GE reportedly paid no US taxes, though it paid $3 billion in taxes to foreign jurisdictions in which it operates).

Although clearly all of these nominally US corporations and their chief executives are American, it is equally clear that their real allegiance — since as we are continuously told, the fiduciary duty of corporate executives is to maximize shareholder value — is not to Uncle Sam. When push comes to shove, if a policy or bill in Congress is going to threaten their international business operations, these executives are going to lobby against it. If there’s a bill that will help them move profits abroad, they’ll push for it. They should, therefore, be required to register as foreign agents, yet never has such a thing even been proposed.

It makes a joke out of this whole campaign attacking RT-TV.  Especially as it’s a safe bet — so safe I’m not even going to make the effort to dig up the numbers — that many or most of the Democrats and Republicans in Congress clamoring to have RT banned solicit and happily accept campaign contributions from these so-called American companies every election cycle, which should be rights make them also foreign agents in practice.

counterpunch.org

Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content that threatens their rule. But in the “democratic” west, it is being done differently. The state does not have to interfere directly – it outsources its dirty work to corporations.

As soon as next month, the net could become the exclusive plaything of the biggest such corporations, determined to squeeze as much profit as possible out of bandwith. Meanwhile, the tools to help us engage in critical thinking, dissent and social mobilisation will be taken away as “net neutrality” becomes a historical footnote, a teething phase, in the “maturing” of the internet.

In December the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to repeal already compromised regulations that are in place to maintain a semblance of “net neutrality”. Its chairman, Ajit Pai, and the corporations that are internet service providers want to sweep away these rules, just like the banking sector got rid of financial regulations so it could inflate our economies into giant ponzi schemes.

That could serve as the final blow to the left and its ability to make its voice heard in the public square.

It was political leaders – aided by the corporate media – who paved the way to this with their fomenting of a self-serving moral panic about “fake news”. Fake news, they argued, appeared only online, not in the pages of the corporate media – the same media that sold us the myth of WMD in Iraq, and has so effectively preserved a single party system with two faces. The public, it seems, needs to be protected only from bloggers and websites.

The social media giants soon responded. It is becoming ever clearer that Facebook is interfering as a platform for the dissemination of information for progressive activists. It is already shutting down  accounts, and limiting their reach. These trends will only accelerate.

Google has changed its algorithms in ways that have ensured the search engine rankings of prominent leftwing sites are falling through the floor. It is becoming harder and harder to find alternative sources of news because they are being actively hidden from view.

Google stepped up that process this week by “deranking” RT and Sputnik, two Russian news sites that provide an important counterweight – even if one skewed in its pro-Russia agenda – to the anti-Russia propaganda spouted by western corporate media. The two sites will be as good as censored on the internet for the vast majority of users.

RT is far from a perfect source of news – no state or corporate media is – but it is a vital voice to have online. It has become a sanctuary for many seeking alternative, and often far more honest, critiques both of western domestic policy and of western interference in far-off lands. It has its own political agenda, of course, but, despite the assumption of many western liberals, it provides a far more accurate picture of the world than the western corporate media on a vast range of issues.

That is for good reason. Western corporate media is there to shore up prejudices that have been inculcated in western audiences over a lifetime – the chief one being that western states rightfully act as well-meaning, if occasionally bumbling, policemen trying to keep order among other, unruly or outright evil states around the globe.

The media and political class can easily tap into these prejudices to persuade us of all sorts of untruths that advance western interests. To take just one example – Iraq. We were told Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda (he didn’t and could not have had); that Iraq was armed with WMD (it wasn’t, as UN arms inspectors tried to tell us); and that the US and UK wanted to promote democracy in Iraq (but not before they had stolen its oil). There may have been opposition in the west to the invasion of Iraq, but little of it was driven by an appreciation that these elements of the official narrative were all easily verified as lies.

RT and other non-western news sources in English provide a different lens through which we can view such important events, perspectives unclouded by a western patrician agenda.

They and progressive sites are being gradually silenced and blacklisted, herding us back into the arms of the corporate propagandists. Few liberals have been prepared to raise their voices on behalf of RT, forgetting warnings from history, such as Martin Niemoller’s anti-Nazi poem “First they came for the socialists”.

The existing rules of “net neutrality” are already failing progressives and dissidents, as the developments I have outlined above make clear. But without them, things will get even worse. If the changes are approved next month, internet service providers (ISPs), the corporations that plug us into the internet, will also be able to decide what we should see and what will be out of reach.

Much of the debate has focused on the impact of ending the rules on online commercial ventures. That is why Amazon and porn sites like Pornhub have been leading the opposition. But that is overshadowing the more significant threat to progressive sites and already-embattled principles of free speech.

ISPs will be given a much freer hand to determine the content we can can get online. They will be able to slow down the access speeds of sites that are not profitable – which is true for activist sites, by definition. But they may also be empowered to impose Chinese-style censorship, either on their own initiative or under political pressure. The fact that this may be justified on commercial, not political, grounds will offer little succour.

Those committed to finding real news may be able to find workarounds. But this is little consolation. The vast majority of people will use the services they are provided with, and be oblivious to what is no longer available.

If it takes an age to access a website, they will simply click elsewhere. If a Google search shows them only corporately approved results, they will read what is on offer. If their Facebook feed declines to supply them with “non-profitable” or “fake” content, they will be none the wiser. But all of us who care about the future will be the poorer.

counterpunch.org

In case you did not know, the “Mirotvorets” is the Ukrainian website which presents and constantly updates the list of people, often including their personal data, whom the local nationalists consider to be the undesirable elements. The list includes not only Russians but also Ukrainians and even prominent Americans and Europeans like actors Steven Seagal and Samy Naseri (French blockbuster Taxi), members of the famous German musical techno band “Scooter”, and others.

The website has been widely and strongly criticized by many journalists, human rights organizations, and even OSCE but this did not stop the “European Values Think-Tank” (EVTT) – a Czech based non-profit funded by George Soros, EU, American Embassy in Prague and some other sources – to produce a report entitled “The Kremlin's Platform for Useful Idiots in the West: An Overview of RT's Editorial Strategy and Evidence of Impact.”

This report contains a spreadsheet with the names of 2327 people who have appeared on Russian TV channel RT and, says the report, “either due to unawareness of RT's political agenda, or indeed explicit support of it, lend their names and credibility to a pseudo-news network and proxy agent of the Kremlin.”

Well, one could say that all the people mentioned in EVTT report are pretty lucky since some of them like President Trump and Professor Cohen have been called other names in the mainstream media comparing with which the “useful idiot” definition sounds like a compliment.

The research done by EVTT did not require a lot of deep analysis, as its methodology was very simple: as long as one appears on any of RT’s program his or her name is added to this “shameful” list.

The reason, as the report reveals, “RT uses guest appearances by Western politicians, journalists and writers, academics, and other influential public personalities to boost its credibility.”

So, according to EVTT, the current US Ambassador to Moscow Jon Huntsman, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and former CIA director James Woolsey have also joined the “Kremlin stooges” fraternity.

I am not sure if Senator McCain saw this report, but if he did he might have experienced mixed feelings like a man in the old anecdote observing his mother-in-law flying over the cliff into abyss in his new Ferrari.

We also do not know if this report played any role in the almost immediate follow up demand by US government to RT to register as a foreign agent, but the timing was perfect and the folks at EVTT must be jubilant. Their hard work is appreciated and therefore a continuous flow of financial and moral support among the followers and advocates of western values in high places is guaranteed.

One wonders if some lawyers like Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz whose name is on the list and who usually does not mince words will say something but so far, he is quiet despite the EVTT’s accusations being rather strong.

According to the report, “Appearing on RT is not harmless, it enables and legitimates RT's subversive agenda… It is therefore impossible to appear on RT without being ultimately complicit in its efforts to undermine Western democracy and pollute the information space.”

Well, some folks did express outrage. For example, Fred Weir who covers Russia for Christian Science Monitor calls the report “mostly ridiculous, hyperventilating nonsense….creating blacklists is a dangerously fraught operation in almost any circumstance, but this collection of "useful idiots" who have appeared on various RT shows is a travesty of everything the people at this "European Values" think tank claim to be upholding.”

Professor Mark Galeotti from New York University in Prague goes a bit further calling its authors “the witch-hunting charlatans of European Values.”

The only thing I’d replace in Mark’s statement is the word “European” for “Western” as its sponsors and authors definitely want to speak not just for Europe but for the whole western civilization.

With no discernable defenders among America’s media establishment, RT rightly denounced the selective FARA mandate as an attack on media freedom – which it is. But more ominous is what the move against RT says about America’s rulers’ further intention to limit the sources of information available to its subjects.

As Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute writes:

“RT America is a news organization operating in the United States that is funded at least partly by a foreign government. So is the BBC. So is Deutsche Welle, France24, Al-Jazeera, and numerous other foreign media organizations. It is assumed that they all to a degree reflect the editorial interests of those who pay the bills.

“The same is true with other, non-state funded media outlets, of course. It’s up to us to factor these things in when we consume media. That’s what it means to be a free people.

“A core value in a free society is that our own government has zero power over what we read, what we watch, how we think, how we come to interpret current events, the conclusions we draw based on these inputs, and so on. These are private matters over which any government that is not tyrannical should have no sway.

“The real insidiousness of tyrannical systems is that the government most lasciviously seeks control over most private spaces — including the most private space called our brain, our intellect, our conscience. We must be free to follow our interests down whatever path they may lead us so that we may reach our own conclusions and then perhaps test them ourselves in the marketplace of ideas.”

The attack on RT (and another Russian network, Sputnik, which evidently has not yet been given a deadline for registration) is a milestone in the degeneration of the American official (call them what you want – corporate, legacy, mainstream) media into PR agencies for the governing establishment and its ideological imperatives. We’ve been moving along this path for a while now, and it’s going to get worse.

Long gone are those halcyon days of yore when Americans could just sit back and watch CBS’s Walter Cronkite with total confidence they were getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. (For youngsters who have no idea who the hell Cronkite was, just Google “most trusted man in America.”) Back in the naïve infancy of the TV age, from about the 1950s until the beginning of the 1990s, there was a common national media culture that reflected the established, generally liberal, mainly Democratic tilt of the American inteligentsiya that was almost uniform among the (then only) three networks and a handful of major newspapers and magazines. To be sure, that was also a ruling class media of a sort, but it reflected a broad and deep social consensus.

Those days are no more. Perhaps the unraveling of media trust and social consensus alike started in earnest with Vietnam. But still, for decades afterwards there still seemed to be plenty of empty cranial receptacles for government and corporate propaganda of the first Gulf War under Bush 41, Bill Clinton’s phony humanitarian wars in the Balkans, Bush 43’s Iraq War, and Obama’s Libyan and Syrian imbroglios. Sadly, there are many such cranial receptacles even today.

By its attack on RT, the US government is officially telling us that only the mainstream media (MSM) can be regarded as are purveyors of Truth (with a capital T) and that anybody not on the approved list is fake. How do we know? Why, the MSM themselves tell us! The Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” CNN’s “Facts First.” The New York Times’ “The Truth is Hard.” (The fact that certifiably authoritative and truthful media are militantly hostile to Russia, not to mention to Donald Trump, is purely coincidental.)

A lot of Americans don’t buy it anymore, though. Some of the skepticism falls along purely partisan lines reflecting increasing moral and political polarization: our media (which I exclusively consult) tells the truth, but your media (which I don’t consult) are liars. About one-third of Americans get their talking points from, say, Michael Moore, and from Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, with their related internet echoes, while another third gets theirs from Rush Limbaugh, and from Sean Hannity on Fox News, and their internet echo chambers. Increasingly, there is nothing like a national dialogue on anything, but rather two entirely separate, diametrically opposed ideological cultures – and alternate realities – each demonizing “them.” This is why when after Barack Obama’s election the Tea Party appeared, the GOP fell over itself trying to co-opt them, while the Democrats denounced them as a mob of racists and subversives. When later the “Occupy” and Black Lives Matter movements broke out on the Left, the Democrats tried to figure out how to channel it while top Republicans denounced it as gang of commie anarchists and losers.

With the election of Donald Trump the divide intensified further to one of latent civil war.

At some point the false picture of pseudo-reality (as Alain Besançon called it in the late Soviet propaganda context) diverges so far from real reality that the official media narrative becomes useless and even counterproductive. While a majority of Americans probably are still glued to the partisan outlets of “their” side of the political divide, there is a growing sense across the spectrum that not only the MSM but even partisan media like Fox News and MSNBC are untrustworthy.

In the past, notably in the totalitarian societies of the 20^th century, maintaining the credibility of official media required the physical repression of alternatives. Today, such a crude approach is unnecessary and almost technologically unfeasible, even for such undemocratic countries as Iran, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia (though North Korea may be successful through the sheer unavailability of modern communications technology to most of the population). Instead of suppressing dissent, is it sufficient to maintain major media’s role as gatekeeper and certifier of reliability.

Which brings us back to the impact of foreign media like RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation, Al-Jazeera, CGTN, Press TV, often in parallel with alternative media like Zero Hedge, Lew Rockwell, Antiwar.com, Ron Paul Institute, and others, to break through the information firewall but arguably then being influenced by the agenda of the sponsoring foreign governments. In any case, a growing segment of the American public is discovering a skill once well-honed by the citizens of the former communist countries: reading between the lines of the official media (which is assumed to be full of lies) and making informed comparisons to samizdat alternative media, foreign sources, and the rumor-mill to guess what the truth might be.

Make no mistake – what has started with RT won’t end with RT. Our betters have decided they need to protect our minds from “propaganda” penetration that might cause us to doubt the truth of what CNN and the Washington Post tell us.

Citizens! Be grateful for such wise leaders and dedicated information workers! Smash the enemy voices that seek to undermine our democracy as we march boldly into the radiant future!

However, the U.S. Justice Department is taking this action even though the U.S. Senate hasn't yet so much as taken up consideration of the bill, put forth by New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (and cosponsored by three other Democrats and one Republican), to allow such action.

The bill is titled "S.625 – Foreign Agents Registration Modernization and Enforcement Act”, and was introduced in the U.S. Senate on March 14th. Its Section Five revises Section 12 of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, which had been passed in preparation for World War II. The bill would revise Section 12 to say as follows:

Sec. 12. The Assistant Attorney General for National Security, through the FARA Registration Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, shall submit a semiannual report to Congress regarding the administration of this Act, including, for the reporting period, the identification of–

(1) registrations filed pursuant to this Act;

(2) the nature, sources, and content of political  propaganda disseminated and distributed by agents of foreign principal;

(3) the number of investigations initiated based upon a  perceived violation of section 7; and

(4) the number of such investigations that were referred  to the Attorney General for prosecution.

So far as is known, only RT and Russia's radio equivalent, Sputnik, have been demanded by the Justice Department to register as “Foreign Agent.” UK's BBC has not. Turkey’s TRT World has not. Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabia has not. Qatar’s Al-Jazeera has not. 

Iran’s equivalent, Press TV, was earlier removed not only in the U.S. but in Europe, and not under any law at all. Wikipedia states:

In July 2013 Press TV and other Iranian channels were removed from several European and American satellites (amongst others those of Eutelsat and Intelsat), allegedly because of the Iran sanctions, even though an EU spokesperson told the channel that these sanctions do not apply to media.[26][27] In November 2012, the Hong Kong-based AsiaSat took Iranian channels off air in East Asia, and in October 2012 Eutelsat and Intelsat stopped broadcasting several Iranian satellite channels, though the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting managed to resume broadcasts after striking deals with smaller companies that are based in other countries.[27]

Press TV was not restored to access to Western audiences after the economic sanctions against Iran were lifted following passage of the nuclear deal with Iran, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, entered into force on 14 July 2015. The West’s ban on Press TV continues unchanged into the present, and is a separate act of hostility by the U.S. and Europe against Iran, not connected at all to the supposed nuclear threat from Iran. And, so, since Iran is already gone from American telecasts, the Trump Administration can’t force it to register as a “Foreign Agent.”

However, obviously, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions thinks that he can legally punish RT and Sputnik if they don’t register, like German and Japanese agents had to before and then during WW II. Then, in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the FARA was used against that country (the U.S.S.R.). Then, the U.S. and its allies pretended to end the Cold War when the U.S. and Russia came to a verbal agreement in 1990 between the agents of George Herbert Walker Bush and of Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War if the Soviet Union broke up and ended its communism and ended its Warsaw Pact military Alliance, even while America’s NATO military alliance would be allowed to continue on but not to expand, but Bush was lying and had no intention of NATO following through with that verbal promise not to take on new members. And, under U.S. President Barack Obama, starting in 2011, a plan was put into place for a coup to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected President and install an anti-Russian regime there in that nation which has the longest of all European borders with Russia, in order to allow U.S. missiles to be stationed there against Moscow; but, though the coup was successful, Ukraine hasn’t yet been admitted into NATO, which would be required in order to position those missiles there and maybe say “Checkmate!” to Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin. So: the U.S. rationale for its economic sanctions against Russia, and for the entire post-2013 escalation of America’s war against Russia (including this bill by Shaheen, and Trump’s premature implementation of it), is Russia’s response to the 2014 U.S. coup in Ukraine — America’s illegal overthrow and replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected government.

It’s not at all clear that the U.S. can legally punish RT and Sputnik if they refuse the demand to register as “Foreign Agents” — meaning, actually, enemy agents.

Technically, however, a “Foreign Agent” isn’t necessarily an “enemy agent,” because the U.S. required agencies of Japan and of Germany to register as “Foreign Agents” even before the military hostilities in WW II began. No declaration of war was necessary.

But the argument that Russia is America’s “enemy” is a result from America’s coup overthrowing and replacing Ukraine’s Government, and the resulting breakaway from Ukraine of two regions that had voted over 75% for the President whom Obama’s operation overthrew, and Obama’s subsequent slapping on of sanctions against Russia for its defending the residents in those two breakaway regions against the new regime’s army. Such a formal designation as “Foreign Agents” would simply be adding insult to injury. And Congress hasn’t yet authorized this. At the very least, Trump is jumping the gun here. The bill hasn’t even been taken up yet by any Committee in the U.S. Senate, much less passed the Committee, much less passed by the full Senate, much less passed by both houses, much less signed into law by the President. But the President’s Administration is behaving as if it already had been passed into law.

In his foreign policies, Trump turns out to be just a more reckless version of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Though the domestic polices are different, both men are neoconservatives who had hidden that fact from the public in order to be able to win the White House. Whereas Obama waited to be re-elected to bare his fangs, Trump is doing it right away. He might as well be Hillary Clinton, the Obama Administration’s super-hawk, who lost to Trump partly because she had displayed her fangs proudly.

As regards the legality of what the U.S. Government is doing, Senator Shaheen says that what the Justice Department is doing is based upon Russia’s being an “adversary” of the United States. On Tuesday, September 12^th, she praised the Trump Justice Department for declaring RT and Sputnik “foreign agents.” The Hill reported, on that day:

Shaheen on Monday lauded the Justice Department’s efforts to probe into Sputnik’s internal structure.

“I’m very encouraged that the FBI is investigating the Sputnik news agency, which is funded by the Russian government. We can’t allow foreign agents, particularly those working on behalf of our adversaries, to skirt our laws,” Shaheen said in a statement. “Every new revelation about Russia's use of propaganda to influence the 2016 election further highlights the need for the federal government to bolster its enforcement of FARA.”

She didn’t think that her proposed "S.625 – Foreign Agents Registration Modernization and Enforcement Act” would even need to be passed into law. The Republican Administration was already acting as if it had been passed, and she praised it for doing this. Perhaps “investigating the Sputnik news agency” is legal, but this wouldn’t necessarily mean that the Justice Department’s acting as if an investigation had been done would be legal. And the Justice Department is acting as if an investigation had been done, and some legal process had concluded from it that Sputnik is a “Foreign Agent.” So: Senator Shaheen was there also jumping the gun.

As regards the actual legality, however, there are many real problems, including not only the selectivity of which foreign news-operations in the U.S. are to be prosecuted in an instance where Congress hasn’t yet declared war against Russia, but even the provision of the existing FARA defining “Foreign Agent.” The existing FARA says:

(d) The term ‘‘agent of a foreign principal’’ does not include any news or press service or association organized under the laws of the United States or of any State or other place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, or any newspaper, magazine, periodical, or other publication for which there is on file with the United States Postal Service information in compliance with section 3611 2 of title 39, published in the United States, solely by virtue of any bona fide news or journalistic activities, including the solicitation or acceptance of advertisements, subscriptions, or other compensation therefor, so long as it is at least 80 per centum beneficially owned by, and its officers and directors, if any, are citizens of the United States, and such news or press service or association, newspaper, magazine, periodical, or other publication, is not owned, directed, supervised, controlled, subsidized, or financed, and none of its policies are determined by any foreign principal defined in subsection (b) of this section, or by any agent of a foreign principal required to register under this subchapter.

Regarding RT America, RT has not made clear what the owner of their network’s U.S.-based operation is, much less what the ownership-structure of it is.

The law normally applies to political consultants and those working in lobbying or public relations. The enforcement of FARA has been weak historically. There are 401 entities in the active FARA register that include tourist boards and lobbyists. Normally, media organizations have been exempted from the law. After all, RT and Sputnik are legitimate news outlets no different than the BBC or Germany’s Deutsche Welle, neither of which is subject to FARA. The legal pressure upon them has grave implications for freedom of speech.

RT America can continue to operate in the United States but it will have to regularly submit the information about its sources of foreign government-tied revenue and the contacts it made the US. Any news product must be labeled as being influenced or financed by the Russian government. The broadcaster might be asked to provide the list of all the employees, their salaries, home addresses and telephones.

Earlier this year, a Democratic senator and two congressmen from both parties introduced a bill called the Agents Registration Modernization and Enforcement Act, which would broaden the scope of FARA. They specifically named RT as a target of the legislation.

RT and Sputnik were identified in a US intelligence report in January as being arms of Russia’s “state-run propaganda machine” that served as a “platform for Kremlin messaging to Russian and international audiences.” The report states that the outlets played a role in Russia’s “influence campaign” to back Donald Trump and attack Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to it, RT "actively collaborated with WikiLeaks" during the presidential election. The paper asserts that Sputnik and RT “consistently cast President-elect Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional US media outlets that they claimed were subservient to a corrupt political establishment.”

According to RT editor- in-chief Margarita Simonyan, the registration "may entail restrictions that will simply not allow us to work in" the United States. She pointed out that a campaign to “ruin the reputation” of RT was followed by “people being put under critical pressure so that they won’t appear on air and stopped giving us interviews.” On September 29, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a Security Council meeting that Russian media outlets abroad were facing increasing and "unacceptable" pressure. That statement followed an accusation the previous day by the Russian Foreign Ministry that the United States was placing "unwarranted pressure" on Russia's RT television network by compelling it to register as a foreign agent. The Ministry said that every move in relation to a Russian media will have a relevant response.

The recent attack against RT and Sputnik is part of a broader picture. The US countermeasures aren’t limited to those stemming from Mueller’s probe. The Department of Homeland Security has said all government agencies must stop using Kaspersky Lab products within 90 days, fearing that the Moscow-based cybersecurity company might be susceptible to Kremlin influence.

It makes spring to mind the hysteria over the activities of former Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, who was accused of attempts to influence the presidential election and other wrongdoings just because he met some people, which is part of his job. The NATO-linked Atlantic Council went as far as Poland to include RT into the list of targets for cyberattacks!

35 Russian diplomats were expelled from the US in late 2016. In early September, three Russian diplomatic outposts – the consulate in San Francisco and trade offices in Washington and New York – were seized after it was confirmed that the Russian staff had complied with the administration’s order to get out within two days. It was done in open violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, Article 17 of which states that «the receiving State shall, even in case of armed conflict, respect and protect the consular premises, together with the property of the consular post and the consular archives». The same way the attacks against the media outlets violate the universally accepted norms of freedom of speech.

Actually, the US itself is involved in activities it tries to put the blame on Russia for. The government spends budget money on involvement in other states internal affairs and propaganda efforts. In 2008, the State Department created the Digital Outreach Team to engage on Internet sites, including on blogs, news sites and discussion forums. Formally, its mission is to “explain US foreign policy and to counter misinformation”.

It was the British Guardian, not a Russian newspaper, that published the story about the Pentagon’s Operation Earnest Voice (OEV) program. The aim of the initiative is to develop software that would allow to secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. The publication said the US military was developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets". Each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

The Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014 envisaged providing funds “to strengthen democratic institutions and political and civil society organizations in the Russian Federation.” As part of anti-Russian sanctions, the US State Department allocated $60 million to 'Russian democratic and civil organizations for the support of media and free internet in Russia' from 2016 to 2018. The State Department is to allocate $20 million annually for these purposes, acting both directly and via Soros’s National Endowment for Democracy.

The list can go on. The hunchback does not see his own hump. Looks like the US administration under pressure from Congress is doing its best to thwart any attempts to ease the tensions between the two countries. It does not hesitate to use any methods to achieve the goal, including trampling on the core America value such as freedom of speech.

This is the first time that Facebook has ever blocked the content of any media outlet from appearing on the service. No other news outlet has been punished by Facebook in a manner like this.

The event is part of a broader picture. A few hours after the Facebook ban, RT claimed that some users had complained about not being able to see news from the broadcaster on other social media platforms. It was corrected later. Dataminr, a news-alert service partly owned by Twitter, has terminated its contract with the broadcaster. RT has received a request from YouTube to show that its employees were not among the individuals sanctioned by the US over Ukraine.

RT appears to come under attacks coming from all sides. The journalists and university professors in the United States who have appeared on RT television have been blacklisted. Last October, the National Westminster Bank informed RT that it would no longer have the broadcaster among its clients. The bank provided no explanation for the decision. «They closed our accounts in Britain. All of them. ‘Decision not to be discussed’. Long live freedom of speech!» RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said on her Twitter account.

The US intelligence report on Russia’s alleged hacking issued this January says «RT — as well as Sputnik, another Russian government–funded English-language propaganda outlet — began aggressively producing pro-Trump and anti-Clinton content starting in March 2016. That just so happens to be the exact same time the Russian hacking campaign targeting Democrats began». The authors of the paper affirm that «During the 2016 campaign, RT aired a number of weird, conspiratorial segments — some starring WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange — that cast Clinton as corrupt and funded by ISIS and portrayed the US electoral system as rigged».

The idea to use soft power for political ends has been glorified in the West, becoming part of all foreign policy concepts. Freedom of speech has always been extolled, any attempts to curtail it have been slammed. Now the West is losing the battle to the Russian outlet offering its own opinions and it is ready to go to any length in an effort to reverse the trend, including outright pressure.

RT challenges the West’s hegemonic grip on shaping and controlling the global media agenda. The broadcaster is popular with Western audiences because it offers a refreshingly different perspective. The RT broadcasting is called «propaganda» simply because it says something different.

Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, believes that US media are a «disgrace» and the quality of published material is «embarrassingly low». According to him, «we have a system that’s owned and dominated by a handful of huge corporations».

RT has provided independent journalists and professors a chance to make detailed arguments often contradicting the views expounded by Western mainstream media. Remember how the US and UK «pro-establishment» outlets defended the idea of military intervention in Iraq? That’s life. Governments are prone to employ strategies of manipulation to shape public opinions.

Alternative sources of information are the only way to shape impartial views. One has the right to choose news sources. Useful insights and information may be gained from a variety of the media outlets and RT is the one.

Until now RT has fended off the attacks. It has mustered broad support, including in social networks. The AP has not openly accused RT of running a pirated live-stream of outgoing President Barack Obama’s final speech. Nothing was said openly. Facebook has not responded to RT to explain why the restrictions have been placed on its account. The YouTube’s request on sanctioned RT employees was said to be not politically motivated. But it’s not the end. The pressure will grow stronger to threaten the very same values the West has sworn to protect.

For instance, the human rights situation in America evokes concern serious enough to be addressed by media independent from the US government. For instance, Paul Craig Roberts, former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, asked for Russian citizenship accused of being a Russian agent for speaking his mind fearlessly. In particular, in an appearance on RT Mr. Roberts dared to support Senator Bernie Sanders for president.

Many hold an opinion that an information war is being waged. But even wars have certain laws to abide by but RT appears to be engaged in a fight without rules.