Russia · Bias: State propaganda
Russian Government
Launched by the Kremlin to push Russian state narratives to English-speaking audiences, RT is now formally banned from broadcasting across the entire European Union, on top of earlier bans in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Germany — meaning most of the West has simply switched it off rather than compete with it. Its credibility problem isn't just external, either. In March 2014, RT America anchor Liz Wahl resigned live on air mid-broadcast, telling viewers she "cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin" — a clip that went viral and remains one of the starkest on-camera resignations in TV history. OWNERSHIP AS OF OCTOBER 2026 RT is not owned by a company or a family. It is run by a Russian non-profit called ANO TV-Novosti, and the money comes from the Russian federal budget. That is the whole ownership story: the Russian state pays for it, and the Russian state is the only shareholder that matters. Russia's 2025 budget set aside 31.1 billion rubles (roughly $377 million) for ANO TV-Novosti, about 9 percent more than the year before (The Moscow Times, December 2024; Meduza). Draft figures for 2026 and beyond have been reported by several Russian and Ukrainian outlets, but they don't agree with each other, so we won't quote one here. The editor-in-chief is Margarita Simonyan, who has run RT since it launched in 2005 and has also run the state news agency Rossiya Segodnya since 2013. She said in September 2025 that she was being treated for cancer, and in September 2026 she said her tests were clear (Meduza, 8 September 2026). As of this review she is still in the job. She is personally under US and EU sanctions. The US Treasury named her on 4 September 2024, along with her deputy Elizaveta Brodskaia and eight others, in what it called a response to Moscow's "malign influence efforts" aimed at the 2024 US election. The same week, two RT employees were indicted in New York on money-laundering and foreign-agent charges, and the State Department put RT on its list of foreign missions, which means it has to register with the US government the way an embassy would. So "who owns RT" has a one-line answer: the Russian government, through a non-profit, with its editor sanctioned by Washington and Brussels. IS RT LEFT OR RIGHT? Our honest answer: that's the wrong axis. In our reading, RT isn't left or right in the way Fox or the Guardian are. It is pro-Moscow, full stop, and it will borrow left-wing anti-war language on Monday and right-wing anti-immigration language on Tuesday if either helps the Kremlin's story that day. The pattern we see most often in its headlines is grammar: when Russia fires a missile, the missile has no owner; when Ukraine does, Ukraine is named in the first word. Our archive has dozens of examples. Here are seven. On 1 August 2026, we noted RT's headline on a Kyiv strike that killed nine people was "Several waves of missiles hit Kiev – reports." No Russia, no dead, and the sourcing was a shrug. On 2 August 2026, one day later, a bomb went off at a Moscow restaurant. RT's headline found a word for it immediately: "the very definition of terrorism," delivered through a retired Pentagon analyst so the word had an American accent. On 28 July 2026, Zelensky met Britain's new prime minister on an aircraft carrier. Euronews wrote that Burnham "pledges UK's full support." RT's version of the same handshake: "Zelensky wants drone plant in UK." On 27 July 2026, every newsroom asked why US strikes on Iran had paused. RT's front page answered with "Trump rejects reports of US missile shortfall," which is how you print a claim while only technically reporting a denial. On 29 August 2026, a Russian strike on a depot near Kyiv killed 37 people, and Russia's own defence ministry claimed it. RT's headline: "WATCH huge blasts rock 'missile warehouse' near Kiev." The blasts did it. The warehouse got scare quotes. On 4 September 2026, a Russian drone hit Ukraine's intelligence headquarters in central Kyiv. The Guardian and CNN wrote "Russia strikes." RT wrote "Ukraine accuses Russia of striking SBU building in Kiev." On 8 September 2026, after a five-hour missile and drone attack on Kyiv that tore open a residential block, RT's headline said Russia "resumes strikes on military targets in Kiev." No "claims," no "says Moscow." The only source for "military targets" was the Russian Defence Ministry describing its own missiles. That's the pattern: RT does not forget how to write an active sentence. It remembers perfectly well whenever Moscow is the victim. IS RT RELIABLE? CAN YOU CITE IT? Here is the regulatory record, which is unusually long for one outlet. In July 2019, the UK regulator Ofcom fined RT £200,000 for breaking its due impartiality rules in seven programmes broadcast in spring 2018, including coverage of the Skripal poisoning and the war in Syria. Ofcom called them "serious and repeated failures of compliance with our rules." RT said the fine was "particularly inappropriate and disproportionate" and went to court over it. On 18 March 2022, Ofcom revoked RT's UK licence altogether, with 29 separate investigations into its Ukraine coverage still open. Ofcom's conclusion was that the licence holder was not "fit and proper" and that, given Russia's new laws on war reporting, it appeared impossible for RT to comply with the impartiality rules at all. The EU suspended RT's broadcasting across all member states on 2 March 2022, saying the outlet was "essential and instrumental" in supporting the invasion of Ukraine. Canada's regulator removed RT from its approved channel list on 16 March 2022. Meta banned RT and Rossiya Segodnya from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads worldwide on 16 September 2024, citing foreign interference. So can you cite it? Our view: you can cite RT for one thing only, which is what the Russian state wants you to believe on a given day. That is genuinely useful if that's your question. For what actually happened, treat every RT line the way RT treats Ukrainian casualty counts: as a claim, attributed, awaiting a second source. Our dated examples above are our own reading of headlines, not a scientific scoring system, and the regulators' findings are the record, not us. WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY ASK Is RT news reliable? Not as a sole source. UK, EU and Canadian regulators pulled it off air in 2022, and Ofcom had already fined it for impartiality breaches in 2019. Use it only to learn Moscow's line. Is RT news banned in the UK? Yes, from television. Ofcom revoked its licence on 18 March 2022. Its website is still reachable from the UK, so "banned" means off TV, not off the internet. Is RT news banned in the US? Not banned outright. RT America shut down in March 2022, and since September 2024 RT has to register as a foreign mission, its top editors are sanctioned, and Meta has removed it from its platforms. You can still read rt.com in the US. Who owns Russia Today? The Russian government, through the non-profit ANO TV-Novosti, funded directly from the federal budget. There is no private owner. Is RT news left or right? Neither, in our reading. It is pro-Kremlin, and it borrows whichever side's vocabulary fits the day. WHAT CHANGED Last reviewed 8 October 2026: added the ownership and funding section, the 2024 US sanctions, the full Ofcom timeline, and seven dated examples from our own archive.
After the March 2018 nerve-agent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, British investigators identified two Russian military intelligence officers as the attackers. RT's response, that September, was to put the two accused men on air for an interview in which they claimed, straight-faced, that they were simply tourists — sports nutritionists, specifically — who'd traveled to a small English cathedral city to admire its famous spire. The goal was classic disinformation strategy: flood the information space with an alternative story, however implausible, so the public loses confidence in any single version of events. It backfired badly — the interview was almost universally mocked across international media, and British officials called it an insult to public intelligence rather than a credible defense.