Russia Says It Will Retaliate Against Germany’s Ban Of RT TV

UK media is report­ing that Rus­sia announced it would retal­i­ate against Ger­many for ban­ning the Ger­man-lan­guage ser­vice of Russ­ian broad­cast­er RT. Accord­ing to a Reuters report:

Feb­ru­ary 2, 2022 MOSCOW ‑Rus­sia will retal­i­ate against Ger­many for ban­ning the Ger­man-lan­guage ser­vice of Russ­ian broad­cast­er RT, and the response will impact Ger­man media accred­it­ed in Rus­sia and inter­net “inter­me­di­aries”, the for­eign min­istry said on Wednes­day.  Germany’s MABB media watch­dog and Com­mis­sion for Licens­ing and Super­vi­sion (ZAK) of media insti­tu­tions said on Wednes­day that RT DE need­ed a licence that con­formed with Germany’s State Media Treaty and could not replace it with a dif­fer­ent licence.  “This move deprives us of any choice but to embark on retal­ia­to­ry mea­sures against Ger­man media accred­it­ed in Rus­sia, as well as against inter­net inter­me­di­aries that have vol­un­tar­i­ly and ground­less­ly delet­ed accounts of the TV chan­nel from their plat­forms,” the Russ­ian for­eign min­istry said in a state­ment.  RT said it will go to court over the Ger­man deci­sion.  In Decem­ber, YouTube had removed RT DE, say­ing it vio­lat­ed com­mu­ni­ty stan­dards, and the MABB media watch­dog for Berlin and the state of Bran­den­burg ruled RT DE was not eli­gi­ble to broad­cast in Ger­many for licens­ing rea­sons.  The ban led to Eutel­sat remov­ing RT Deutsch from the list of chan­nels broad­cast from its satel­lites, though the broad­cast­er con­tin­ued to stream con­tent on its website.

Read the rest here.

Last month, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report report­ed that RT Deutsch, Russia’s Ger­man-lan­guage media out­let, launched a 24/7 live chan­nel on YouTube. In April, we report­ed on the grow­ing dis­pute between Ger­many and Rus­sia over the estab­lish­ment of RT TV.

In 2017, the NYT char­ac­ter­ized RT as follows:

Ana­lysts are sharply divid­ed about the influ­ence of RT. Point­ing to its minus­cule rat­ings num­bers, many cau­tion against over­stat­ing its impact. Yet focus­ing on rat­ings may miss the point, says Peter Pomer­ant­sev, who wrote a book three years ago that described Russia’s use of tele­vi­sion for pro­pa­gan­da. “Rat­ings aren’t the main thing for them,” he said. “These are cam­paigns for finan­cial, polit­i­cal and media influ­ence.” RT and Sput­nik pro­pel those cam­paigns by help­ing cre­ate the fod­der for thou­sands of fake news prop­a­ga­tors and pro­vid­ing anoth­er out­let for hacked mate­r­i­al that can serve Russ­ian inter­ests, said Ben Nim­mo, who stud­ies RT for the Atlantic Coun­cil. What­ev­er its impact, RT is unques­tion­ably a case study in the com­plex­i­ty of mod­ern pro­pa­gan­da. It is both a slick mod­ern tele­vi­sion net­work, dressed up with great visu­als and styl­ish pre­sen­ters, and a con­tent farm that helps feed the Euro­pean far right. View­ers find it dif­fi­cult to dis­cern exact­ly what is jour­nal­ism and what is pro­pa­gan­da, what may be “fake news” and what is real but pre­sent­ed with a strong slant.