“I’m proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth, and that is why, after this newscast, I’m resigning.” Liz Wahl had gone off script. In 2014, the American anchor resigned live on air on Russia Today (RT), a Russian state-funded television network she had worked for since 2011. In a solemn voice, she told viewers she could no longer “be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin” in Crimea. In her resignation, Wahl characterized RT as a uniquely foreign propaganda machine that launders the Kremlin line through Western journalists.
Launched in 2005, RT is publicly financed by the Russian government and targeted toward non-Russian audiences, much like Qatar’s Al Jazeera and France’s France24. It quickly expanded, at least by its own metrics: RT claims to have been the first television news channel to reach one billion YouTube views in 2013 and later claimed more than 10 billion views and 16 million subscribers across its channels.
RT’s managing directors assert the network’s mission is “to represent a Russian point of view in the world.” RT questions the legitimacy and objectivity of Western reporting, but it does not purport to be the unbiased alternative. Instead, former managing director Alexander Nikolov argues that “there is no such thing as objective reporting.” RT regularly fills its airtime with falsehoods and misinformation. During the 2008 war in Georgia, the network amplified Moscow’s claim that the Georgian government had committed genocide in South Ossetia, even though the subsequent independent inquiry commissioned by the European Union found no evidence substantiating the allegations. After the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Eastern Ukraine in 2014, RT helped disseminate a carousel of contradictory theories blaming Kyiv, even as international investigations—and later a Dutch court—concluded that the plane was brought down by a Russian-made missile deployed from separatist territory. In the first days of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s regulatory body for broadcasting, found that RT had breached due-impartiality rules 29 times in just four days.
Despite targeting Western audiences, RT’s viewership in the West is actually quite low. A 2024 study of RT’s global audiences found that even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Western users constituted only a small minority of RT’s overall audience. The most recent figures collected by the British Audience Research Board in December 2019 gave RT a daily reach of 87,000 viewers (just 0.02 percent of the UK viewing audience). In the United States, RT has never drawn enough television viewers to register in national figures. Instead, RT has performed better outside of the anglophone West. The same study found much stronger success with Arabic- and Spanish-speaking audiences, and in 2020, RT Arabic and RT Spanish were the two largest RT Facebook pages, both exceeding other pages’ following by over 10 million. This is largely because, as a 2024 book on the network puts it, “Arabic and Latin American media spaces are not similarly governed by conventions of balancing different opinions nor of interrogating official pronouncements.”
But none of this has stopped the Kremlin from continuing to underwrite the RT project. The network enjoyed an annual budget of more than $300 million for much of 2012 to 2022, and, in 2024, it reportedly spent a record 31.7 billion rubles (about $390 million), raising the question of why the Kremlin might be willing to continuously subsidize RT’s efforts in the West despite consistently low viewership.
The answer lies partly in the media environment RT found in America. Although Liz Wahl characterized integrity and facts as defining values of Western journalism, this idealistic media regime had eroded long before RT’s rise. At the outset of the digital age, the boundary between reporting and opinion faded, the barriers to entry for media fell, sensationalism gained traction, and objectivity was increasingly treated as a sham rather than a professional norm. By the early 2000s, a right-wing media ecosystem emerged. Outlets like Infowars, Fox News, and Breitbart, among others, created a media universe built around hyper-conservative partisanship and provocation, rife with misinformation campaigns.
RT recognized its potential to fit right in America’s skewed, increasingly post-truth media landscape. When asked how state-affiliated publications could maintain objectivity, current RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan echoed Nikolov in maintaining that “[t]here is no objectivity,” critiquing even reputable American networks like CNN for “creat[ing] a huge fuss when a single US soldier dies…while not mentioning 2,000 civilians who perish at the same time.” To RT, American media is no more concerned with truth than it is.
For left-leaning Americans seeking entertaining and heavily opinion-driven commentary stylistically akin to Fox News, RT America platformed “discarded pundits” of American television such as Larry King, Ed Schultz, and Jesse Ventura—public Democrats and independents. But the network does not neglect its right-wing audience, either. It also hosted Alex Jones of Infowars and infamous alt-right British politician Nigel Farage among other prominent right-wing commentators. RT evidently has no coherent political ideology, only a philosophical one: that truth can be forfeited in pursuit of views or a “good” story.
Despite exhibiting such blatant disregard for truth and peddling explicit propaganda, RT has bolstered its ranks with a host of young, ambitious Western journalists who are willing to abandon the liberal tenet of truth-seeking for personal gain. In their study of former RT journalists, researchers Mona Elswah and Philip Howard argue the network recruited Westerners with little or no journalistic experience since they were easier to mold and less likely to resist explicit direction from superiors. Former employees describe young British journalists being “pampered with money, makeup artists, and private cars,” given unusually generous screen time, and paid salaries that far exceeded what they could earn in the West after years in reputable networks. As one participant bluntly put it, RT was attractive to new graduates because “the main prerequisite for the job is the language.” The interviewees describe an organization structure in which story selection flowed downward from the (overwhelmingly Russian) senior editorial staff to the young expat journalists, and politically sensitive scripts were screened and modified to align with the Kremlin line. Study participants admitted that “nothing [they] did was [their] own idea.” Another put it quite plainly: RT journalists knew that they were not telling the truth.
As the relevance of television broadcasting plummets, RT appears to have adapted the same strategy for the social media age. In September 2024, the US Treasury accused RT executives of using a front company to covertly recruit unwitting American influencers, while the US Justice Department alleged that RT employees deployed nearly $10 million to finance a Tennessee-based online content company that employed notable conservative influencers like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson.
RT may not have built a mass audience of its own in the West, but it appears to have recognized that the American media ecosystem—much like Russia’s—is drifting away from truth. In an environment increasingly comfortable with ideological theater, RT can recruit washed-up television personalities, oblivious influencers, and, most damningly, young journalists willing to sacrifice their profession’s integrity and commitment to truth for career acceleration. Liz Wahl resigned because she believed that Americans should “disseminat[e] the truth.” But the network from which she resigned is proving that this American ideal is crumbling. RT’s Editor-in-Chief may have been right: The post-truth world Wahl rejected on air looks far less foreign than Americans may like to believe.