Internet News Channels Part 1 – RT Russia Today
Ahh Russia Today, you can’t beat it for sarcasm and laughs. It appears to have newsrooms in both the US and Russia and runs both global and US versions of its English language channel. Both channels have a US focus that takes the news and gives a different perspective on US interests around the world and at home. It’s very clever in that it takes the same approach as the western channels do to the developing world and applies it to the US and Europe. It shows poverty, corruption, the hypocrisy of the governments and financial markets. As an added bonus, some of the presenters use sarcasm and incredulity to make their point and are unashamedly cynical about the ploys of other governments. You have to have more than a passing interest in economics and government to really enjoy this one but anyone who thinks the current economic climate is not working will get something out of it.
It has a libertarian viewpoint with an underlying approach that income distribution is distorted in the West and exposes that those in power act in unethical ways that disadvantage the general population. It does spend a lot of time with panel discussions looking at various news items, I’ve even seen the occasional US Marxist academic interviewed! There’s nothing like the trip down memory lane that a discussion about the means of production can bring. Although when it has a hard core US libertarian on, they are usually guaranteed to make the presenter speechless!
It rarely reports on domestic issues unless it can use the report as a way to promote Russia’s superiority over Western behaviour or to promote the official line on an internationally contentious issue and only occasionally reports on Russia’s dealings with the rest of the world. It has a thing about documentaries on religion, which may be an acquired taste.
There’s no sports or weather reports and very little news on Africa, Asia/Pacific and South America which makes it an odd fish in the global reporting sphere.
All up, it can be a bit strident and repetitive at times but it’s interesting, good fun and certainly worth spending some time getting to know, simply because it goes out of its way to provide information and analysis on items that are usually glossed over by the other English language networks. My recommendations for a great introduction to RT are Prime Interest, Breaking the Set and The Keiser Report. Larry King is also on the US RT channel, so you can dip in if you haven’t had a fix for a while.
It also has two other networks, one in Arabic and one in Spanish.
enjoy!
Links
Next time I’ll look at the BBC