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.
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.