RT Must Be Ostracized

I was recently invited to appear on the RT television network to discuss financial markets and the economy. I declined, and I wanted to explain why. RT is not an ordinary news network, as you might think of one. Instead, it’s a propaganda arm of the Russian government, and they peddle the most absurd programming. RT regularly features Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers and tinfoilers of all stripes, and it’s slickly packaged as regular news. I won’t even mention the oleaginous crank Max Keiser.

But my favorite is Karen Hudes, whom RT has interviewed a few times. RT calls Hudes a World Bank whistleblower, but they neglect to discuss some of her more colorful beliefs. For example, Ms. Hudes believes the world is secretly controlled from the Vatican by Homo Capensis, a large-brained, non-human species. The bishops’ miters hide their elongated skulls.

To be clear, I have no interest in censoring Hudes, or RT or anyone else. In fact, I share their goal of making their views far better known than they are. One of the neglected arguments for Free Speech is that allows you to shine a light on dumb ideas.

I recently tweeted this about some of Ms. Hudes’s views. I was glad to see that Edward Lucas, a senior editor at The Economist, obliquely referred to Ms. Hudes at the recent security conference in Munich.

We need to get back the ability to rebut and to criticize. If RT puts on people – and it does put on people who are Holocaust deniers, who think that 9/11 was an inside job, who believe that [the] Pope is a lizard – I’m not joking, this is true – we should be able to humiliate those channels and those people and the people who put them on, and the producers who put them on and push them out into the media fringes so they are no longer treated as real journalists and real programs but as cranks and propagandists.

I think we could do a bit more of ostracism. I’m quite happy to say that if anyone puts a CV on my desk, and on that CV I see they worked at RT or Sputnik or one of these things, that CV is going into the bin and not into the intro. We would not have accepted it during the Cold War that people could move from working for Pravda, or Izvestia, or TASS, and then into jobs in Western media. Far too many people see a job at RT as the first stage on a career ladder. It’s not. It’s the last stage on a career ladder. It’s like working as a PR person for a tobacco company, but even worse. And only then would I start looking at regulatory things — and there are things we can do on a regulatory side. We have a regulated media space. In my own country, Ofcom is complaining to RT about its lack of balance. So, there are things we can do but I think those things are the last resort, not the first resort.

He’s right. We should ostracize RT’s journalists. This should include Alyona Minkovski, a former RT-er who currently hosts HuffPost Live for the Huffington Post.

Posted by on February 9th, 2015 at 8:57 am


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