RT: How a Mainstream Media Organisation Changes Narratives

RT, formerly Russia Today, claims to tell the stories Western media won’t. What it really does, say regulators and researchers, is push propaganda — deliberately, relentlessly, and with no shame at all. For years, it’s been the Kremlin’s international mouthpiece, spinning wars, laundering lies, and flooding the media landscape with enough noise to make the truth look like just another opinion. But how does it actually do that?

What’s the method? Because there is one — refined over time, deployed worldwide, and designed to make you doubt what you saw with your own eyes.

RT’s Mission Versus Its Role

According to its own mission statements, RT claims to create “news with an edge for viewers who want to question more,” and to acquaint international audiences with a Russian viewpoint on major global events. In other words, the channel pitches itself as an alternative to Western media hegemony – a counterbalance that will show the side of the story others supposedly hide.

RT’s longtime editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, echoes this sentiment, portraying the network as an underdog truth-teller, claiming that there is a “bias” against Russia, and correspondingly, that State-level criticisms of RT represent “overt censorship.”

However, media watchdogs, regulators, and intelligence agencies alike all describe RT in far less heroic terms, with all of the above having identified it as naught but a Kremlin propaganda outlet; one that disseminates disinformation, fosters societal unrest, and counters uncomfortable revelations, rather than trying to put out anything even approaching objective news.

For a specific example, consider the UK’s media regulator Ofcom, which has repeatedly sanctioned RT for violating impartiality rules — such as in 2012, when a news item on Syria was found to be “highly supportive” of the Assad Government. This happened again the following year, when a documentary titled Syrian Diary was cited for failing to represent alternative perspectives of the war. Then, in early 2014, just as tensions were beginning to flare up in Ukraine, Ofcom ruled that several of RT’s news bulletins had ignored key viewpoints – you can guess in what direction – and thus had misled audiences.

And they get the same assessment over in the U.S. too, as in 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the snappily titled report, Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, which called RT out both as the Kremlin’s “principal international propaganda outlet,” and also “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”

Further still though, even RT’s own leadership occasionally lets their masks slip, and reveal what the organisation is really all about. Simonyan, for example, having taken a break from her professional cross carrying, described RT as “waging an information war… with the entire Western World” during the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia.

Such admissions underscore that RT is not a conventional news outlet but a strategic arm of the Russian state – funded by the Kremlin, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and tasked with advancing its geopolitical agenda. In fact, for this reason, it wouldn’t be overly hyperbolic to call RT a de-facto branch of the Russian Military.

Robert Orttung, a professor of International Relations at George Washington University explains this further, stating that, “The purpose of RT is for Russia to fight against the West and democratic values on the cheap. … It is easier to pay for this kind of divisive media coverage than to build a military equal to that of the United States and its allies.”

The Propaganda Playbook

And now that we’ve established that RT does propagandise, let’s start pulling apart the matter of how they propagandise.

In a word, it’s all about subtlety.

When you picture propaganda, what comes to mind tends to be a bit blunt, doesn’t it? A nice old lady in a pink Hanbok delivering the latest glorious successes of socialist construction with vigour and enthusiasm normally only found in the halls of the Royal Shakespeare Company, or a dead-eyed chap in camouflage blasting away on an accordion while his mate goes off on one about Serbia. But Russia, for its part, has noticed that the reaction to such blunt messaging is, well, laughter, not newfound convictions – thus they arrived at the subtle method instead.

As for specifics, analysts have identified a repeatable playbook of disinformation tactics that RT deploys, with researchers at the RAND Corporation, a U.S. based global policy think tank, having dubbed one of their strategies the “Firehose of Falsehood.” That is, putting out so much contradictory messaging, that the reality of a matter finds itself lost under the sheer volume of contradictions. As Giorgio Bertolin, an independent researcher, put it back in 2015, “(Such a strategy) entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

Sometimes, however, RT’s messaging is less scattered birdshot, and more of a targeted slug, particularly when they have a specific line they wish to push, or specific action by the Kremlin that they wish to cover for. And during such instances, they use what Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, dubbed the “4D Model” – Dismiss, Distort, Distract, and Dismay.

First, dismiss the accusation: flatly deny wrongdoing and impugn the accuser. For example, when Russian forces and proxy militants shot down MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, RT immediately dismissed the reports as false and mocked those blaming Russia.

Then, distort: inject doubt or alternative interpretations. Oftentimes, this will be done through out-of-context cherry-picked data, or by wheeling out purported ‘experts’ who, by arguing from a position of perceived authority, will go on to suggest a very different story.

Using the MH17 example again, there, RT didn’t hesitate to point out that a Ukrainian fighter jet was in the same general area as the doomed aircraft, and also present some later-found fabricated radar data that implied it was way closer to MH17 than it actually was. They weren’t intentionally lying through omission, knowing that their audience would assume that the Ukrainians were responsible, oh no no, they were just presenting all the supposedly possible explanations, you see…

The third D, distract, means changing the subject or creating new scandal to draw attention away. This often involves wild whataboutism: Sure, you say Russia did X – but what about your side’s misdeeds?

Again, the MH17 tragedy provides textbook examples: how can they be so bold as to claim it was us who did it, when the U.S. floated the idea of downing its own airliners to start a war with Cuba during Operation Northwoods, lied about WMDs to justify invading Iraq, and lied about being fired upon by the North Vietnamese navy to justify entering the Vietnam War. Clearly! Until all the evidence has been fully exhausted, we cannot rule out the possibility that this is yet another ruse by Uncle Sam for starting a war.

It’d be an understandable chain of logic in the absence of evidence, because, yes, the U.S. did do all of those things, but, when it’s being broadcast after videos have emerged of one specific Buk surface-to-air missile system, previously documented in the area that MH17 went down, being very, very hastily moved back into Russia… the time for ‘speculation in the absence of evidence’ reporting has passed rather, hasn’t it?

And then, the fourth and final D, dismay: scare the audience with all manner of doomsaying and dire consequences. You’ve all heard this one get trotted out before we’re sure as it’s quite a common one: Ukraine has the audacity to launch a counter invasion of Russia, ooooooooh, this could provoke nuclear war. The West puts some sanctions on Russia after it murders one of its political dissidents on British soil, ooooooooh, this could provoke nuclear war. Zelensky mentions not wanting to give up Donetsk or Luhansk during peace talks, ooooooooh, this could provoke nuclear war – and so on and so forth.

The idea behind such lines is simple: if all the obfuscation doesn’t work, encourage people, through fear, to turn the other cheek.

You get the idea then, through both the ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ and the ‘4D Model,’ RT has two reliable ways of bending the narrative to its advantage: either drown the truth under a torrent of contradictions, or hammer away with a neat cycle of denial, distortion, distraction and doom-mongering until doubt is the only thing left standing. Both approaches have the same destination — a public too confused, exhausted, or frightened to hold Moscow to account.

The “So-Called” Bucha Massacre

In March 2022, not even a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the town of Bucha was liberated by Ukrainian forces. What they found — or more accurately, what the world saw once journalists were allowed in — was staggering.

Civilians lying dead in the streets. Bodies with hands tied behind their backs. Women and children buried in hastily dug pits. Satellite imagery, phone videos, and eyewitness accounts all painted a consistent picture: Russian troops had occupied the town, and in that time, they had wantonly murdered hundreds of Ukrainians.

And then it hit the global media — the reaction was swift and furious. Western leaders condemned the killings, Ukrainian officials called it genocide, and human rights organisations began investigations. The evidence, no two ways about it, was absolutely damning against Russia.

RT’s reaction though? Business as usual.

Within hours of the first images surfacing, Russia’s Defence Ministry denied everything — and RT repeated it, describing the accusations as “fake news.” According to RT’s coverage at the time, Moscow “called it a ‘set-up’.”

The wording then hardened into a template that RT has used ever since: “the so-called (Bucha) massacre” was a “false-flag operation intended to tarnish (Russia’s) image.” In some pieces, RT even framed the withdrawal from the Kyiv region as a “goodwill gesture,” instead of the reality of, ‘our logistics are so poor that we can only get one tank of diesel’s worth of distance into Ukraine before our advance totally grinds to a halt.’

With time, as evidence continued to stack up, RT didn’t retract. It shifted. One article asserted Ukraine’s forces had staged “criminal provocations” in Bucha — “by Ukrainian soldiers and radicals” — a formulation designed to flip blame without addressing the basics of time, place, or chain of command. Elsewhere, RT amplified the line that the “so-called” massacre was engineered to “derail the diplomatic process,” pushing motive as a substitute for proof.

And when a European leader reportedly asked President Zelensky for proof the killings “weren’t staged,” RT gave that doubt full oxygen.

In other words: nobody died; if they did, Ukraine did it; and in any case we’re just asking questions.

This wasn’t new behaviour of course, but it worked — in certain corners of the internet, at least, as the hashtag #BuchaHoax began trending within days, and RT talking points got regurgitated on fringe outlets and Telegram channels.

Some Western viewers, already predisposed to doubt ‘mainstream narratives,’ had taken the bait. In that echo chamber, “we’ll never know what really happened” became the default fallback — even as the evidence piled higher and higher…

In Bucha, we saw the anatomy of RT’s strategy — the denial, the distortion, the flood of narrative static. But the real value of that case is how clearly it mirrors what came before. Because this wasn’t the first atrocity RT was tasked with spinning.

MH17

On the 17th of July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, a Boeing 777 carrying 298 souls, was blown out of the sky over eastern Ukraine. Almost immediately, evidence pointed to a Russian-made Buk missile fired from territory held by pro-Russian separatists – effectively, a Kremlin-supplied weapon in the hands of Kremlin proxies.

But, if you turned on RT that day, you saw a reality warp in real time. As smoking debris and bodies lay strewn across Ukrainian fields, RT’s coverage went into overdrive to deflect blame. One of RT’s first reports suggested Ukrainian ground forces might have shot down the plane, perhaps mistaking it for a hostile aircraft.

Within hours, RT was floating a slightly tweaked theory: maybe a Ukrainian fighter jet had downed MH17 in an airborne ambush. When that too started to crumble, RT pivoted again – airing ‘analyses’ that hinted the real target was Vladimir Putin’s presidential plane, and MH17 was tragically mistaken for it. This conspiratorial nugget made it onto RT’s website the day after the crash, only to be quietly toned down later after it drew widespread ridicule.

Not that that stopped RT, of course, and over the following weeks, they kept the Firehose of Falsehood on full blast, with RT – and Russian media more broadly — spawning at least a dozen conflicting narratives about MH17.

One outlandish theory even suggested MH17 was the missing Malaysia MH370 in disguise, packed with corpses and flown over Ukraine as part of a CIA plot. And just for good measure, they also threw some supposed Israeli involvement into the stew.

And the barrage of conflicting never-Russia’s-fault theories just kept coming and coming. The goal was never to prove one coherent alternative, as we explained earlier, it was strategic inconsistency. By pumping out multiple mutually exclusive stories, RT ensured that the average viewer was hopelessly confused, and that more broadly, everyone was confused, as their messaging went on to then find its way to comment sections and dinner tables around the world.

Inside RT however, not everyone stomached this dishonesty. Sara Firth, a London-based RT correspondent, resigned in protest shortly after MH17, calling the channel’s coverage the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“It was the most shockingly obvious misinformation, and I couldn’t defend it anymore,” Firth said of RT’s handling of the crash. She described walking into the newsroom to find editors pushing an “eyewitness account” blaming Ukraine and a studio analyst spinning wild theories – all while bodies were still being identified. In a biting tweet as she quit, Firth wrote: “RT style guide Rule 1: It is ALWAYS Ukraine’s fault”. Her departure, and that acerbic quip, spoke volumes: RT’s reflex was not to mourn the victims or investigate objectively, but to reflexively exonerate Russia and pin blame on Ukraine, facts be damned.

International investigations, however, eventually established what really happened – a Russian Buk missile crew, likely “on loan” to separatists, mistook MH17 for a military target and shot it down.

But thanks in part to RT’s sowing of doubt, a significant minority either doubted Russia’s role or believed outright that Ukraine was culpable. The damage was done, the truth was just one narrative among many, and even to this very day, RT has never settled on a single alternative theory…

Banned but Not Gone – RT’s Post-2022 Adaptation

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sheer audacity of RT’s ‘reporting’ during the Invasion of Ukraine proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, and as a result, the network began to find itself effectively exiled from the Western media landscape.

On the 24th of February 2022, for example, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said plainly: “We will ban the Kremlin’s media machine in the EU. The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, and their subsidiaries, will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war.” Within days, the legal acts followed; Council Regulation 2022/350 and Council Decision 2022/351 — which formally prohibited RT from broadcasting and distribution across the EU’s 27 member states.

In the UK, Ofcom revoked RT’s licence on the 18th of March “with immediate effect,” stating: “we do not consider RT’s licensee, ANO TV Novosti, fit and proper to hold a UK broadcast licence,” and noting 29 ongoing due-impartiality investigations.

Tech platforms moved in parallel: on the 28th of February Meta’s Nick Clegg announced, “we will be restricting access to RT across the EU at this time.” YouTube then followed suit on the 11th of the following month, stating that it was “blocking access globally to channels associated with Russian state-funded media,” citing its policy on violent events.

In the US market, RT America shut down on 3rd of March after major carriers pulled the plug – and the US production company behind RT America laid off its staff that very same day.

Any good propagandist worth his salt doesn’t just give up though, and so, RT began evolving and finding loopholes so that they could keep on getting their pro-Kremlin messaging out into the Western World – setting up mirror websites with new URLs to evade domain bans almost immediately. All of them similar to RT’s original URL, or linked to key phrases likely to come up if someone was actively seeking out their content.

Given time, their ban evasion only grew more complex too, as rather than simply mirroring their main website, as noted by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, a think tank headquartered in London, they also started “covertly laundering (their) content through fake news websites.”

In other words, RT would feed its articles to sympathetic proxy sites that weren’t obviously branded ‘RT,’ allowing their propaganda to slip back into social media circulation via third parties. And because slop is as slop does, the authorities found they had basically no way to combat this, as every time they took down a domain pushing RT copy-and-pastes, two more appear in its place eager to farm the clicks.

It’s a chopping the head off the Hydra situation, basically, and according to research published by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue in August 2025, the Hydra currently has 58 heads.

Further still though, RT also doubled down on Telegram – a kind of WhatsApp alternative – as this just so happened to be basically the only pipe they had that kept flowing when all others had their valves closed. There, today, its flagship English language channel sits at 201,000 subscribers – a figure that makes it RT’s largest outlet today by far, and the central hub through which it pushes breaking news, videos, and the endless stream of Kremlin-friendly framing that once lived on YouTube and Facebook.

Eager to leave no stone unturned, however, RT also started to cultivate their following on YouTube alternatives too such as Odysee, Rumble, and Bitchute. There, able to hide behind such sites’ commitment to uncensored content, they have built a small, but not entirely insignificant following.

On Rumble, for example, they have 136,000 followers as of the time of writing, on Odysee, 68,000, and BitChute, a smidge under 13,000. For views, call it maybe an average of 10,000 across all three platforms according to our from-the-hip eyeball guesstimate, with, as you’d expect, the more exciting stuff, Ukraine War related, and the like, pushing more, and the more boring stuff, Volgograd announces new plan to tackle suburban potholes, and the like, rarely breaking 1,000.

And while all those numbers may sound good, they aren’t. As per the Internet Archive’s last capture before it was removed, they had 4.71 million followers just on their YouTube channel alone… safe to say, today’s RT is but a shadow of its just-about-tolerated-in-the-mainstream former self.

Perhaps most intriguingly though, RT – or at least individuals connected to it – have also begun engaging in more covert influence campaigns.

One example came to light in late 2022: an operation dubbed ‘Doppelgänger’ by the EU DisinfoLab, in which Russian actors created spoofed copies of real news websites to publish pro-Kremlin stories. Basically, you’d try to access, say, BBC news, hit a wrong key while typing, and find yourself on a website all but identical to the real ones, save for the fact that they suddenly have lots of nice things to say about this Putin chap, and a particular emphasis on pointing out that the Ukrainians had it coming, you know.

It goes deeper than just cloning legitimate websites too, because according to Maxime Audinet, a researcher with Institut Montaigne, a think tank based out of Paris, entities linked to RT also funnelled money into a front company called ‘Tenet Media’ to launder and spread pro-Kremlin narratives by hiring online influencers – particularly more right-leaning and/or nationalist ones – to produce videos and provide other similar services. We’re talking big influencers in that space too, with subscriber counts in the millions.

However, we will not be naming the creators in question, because U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland himself said outright, explicitly, that Tenet “never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government.” And so, to stop them catching some stray shots that it would appear they do not deserve, we shall hold our tongues.

It’s also worth noting that as we have alluded to throughout this chapter, all of this only really applies to the Western World, as while Europe and the U.S. cracked down, in places like Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, RT never left – and it’s business as usual in many countries that way. Sure, people in such countries won’t be checking out RT’s Facebook or YouTube feed, but the actual website itself — still there, as it always has been.

On a similar point, naturally, Western audiences can still just access RT’s website if they are so minded by just flicking on a VPN, which, indeed, is exactly how we accessed their website ourselves when researching this piece.

Is It Right to Ban Platforms Such as RT?

And that, pretty much, is our analysis. But rather than ending with a conventional conclusion, one where we just regurgitate information you were all paying perfect attention to the first time around, let’s instead shake things up, and end with a potentially interesting question: is it right to ban platforms such as RT?

On one side are the hard realists. The likes of Dame Melanie Dawes, who oversaw Ofcom’s revocation of RT’s UK licence on grounds of systemic partiality and political control; Thierry Breton and Josep Borrell, who spearheaded EU action on the grounds that wartime information manipulation isn’t just distasteful — it’s dangerous, and Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s former Minister for Digital Transformation, campaigned directly for tech bans.

Their logic is undeniably straightforward and coherent: RT isn’t journalism, but war by other means. And in that framing, sanctions are not censorship, but containment. An act, in many ways, akin to popping a fleet off Russia’s ports to enforce a hard embargo.

And yet, straightforward though their arguments are, there are equally well-justified counterpoints.

For example, legal scholars and multilateral human rights figures — from David Kaye to Irene Khan and Teresa Ribeiro — urge proportionality. They warn that broad-brush deplatforming risks institutionalising the very illiberalism it seeks to guard against.

“Censorship creep” is real, they say, and the political toolkit handed to a liberal democracy today may be wielded differently in less democratic hands tomorrow. There’s also a basic epistemic danger: when a state silences a voice — even a malign one — it grants it, in some quarters, the aura of forbidden truth. And that, too, is informational power.

Which position is correct? We’d never be so bold as to assume we had the answer to a matter so subjective.

And as for which side we fall on – we aren’t telling you. This isn’t about us imposing our own stance upon you, it’s throwing a little mental curveball your way, to get you thinking as we close things off.

So instead, let us throw it back to you. Where do you land on this? Should platforms like RT be banned entirely — treated not as media, but as hostile infrastructure? Or, is that a slippery slope that threatens the very freedoms it claims to protect… the choice is yours.

Key Takeaways

• RT, formerly Russia Today, is widely recognized as a Kremlin propaganda outlet.
• RT uses tactics like the ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ and the ‘4D Model’ to spread disinformation.
• The ‘4D Model’ involves dismissing accusations, distorting facts, distracting from the issue, and dismaying the audience.
• RT has been banned in the EU and UK due to its role in spreading misinformation and propaganda.
• Despite bans, RT continues to operate through mirror websites and alternative platforms.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is RT’s stated mission?

RT claims to create ‘news with an edge for viewers who want to question more’ and to acquaint international audiences with a Russian viewpoint on major global events. It pitches itself as an alternative to Western media hegemony.

How do regulators and researchers describe RT?

Regulators and researchers describe RT as the Kremlin’s international mouthpiece, pushing propaganda, spinning wars, and laundering lies. They identify it as a propaganda outlet that disseminates disinformation and fosters societal unrest.

What are some examples of RT’s biased reporting?

RT has been sanctioned for violating impartiality rules, such as in 2012 for a news item on Syria that was highly supportive of the Assad Government, and in 2013 for a documentary titled ‘Syrian Diary’ that failed to represent alternative perspectives of the war.

What is the ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ strategy?

The ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ strategy involves putting out so much contradictory messaging that the reality of a matter finds itself lost under the sheer volume of contradictions, entertaining, confusing, and overwhelming the audience.

What is the ‘4D Model’ used by RT?

The ‘4D Model’ used by RT involves Dismissing the accusation, Distorting the narrative, Distracting from the issue, and Dismaying the audience with dire consequences.

How did RT respond to the Bucha massacre?

RT described the Bucha massacre as ‘fake news’ and a ‘false-flag operation intended to tarnish Russia’s image.’ They shifted their narrative over time, asserting that Ukraine’s forces had staged ‘criminal provocations’ and that the massacre was engineered to ‘derail the diplomatic process.‘

What was RT’s coverage of the MH17 incident?

RT’s coverage of the MH17 incident involved floating multiple conflicting narratives, including suggestions that Ukrainian ground forces or a fighter jet might have shot down the plane, and even outlandish theories about the plane being part of a CIA plot.

How has RT adapted after being banned in the Western media landscape?

RT has set up mirror websites, covertly laundered content through fake news websites, doubled down on Telegram, and cultivated followings on YouTube alternatives like Odysee, Rumble, and Bitchute. They have also engaged in covert influence campaigns, such as creating spoofed copies of real news websites.

What is the debate surrounding the banning of platforms like RT?

The debate involves hard realists who argue that RT is war by other means and should be contained, versus legal scholars and human rights figures who warn of ‘censorship creep’ and the potential for institutionalizing illiberalism.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: RT: How a Mainstream Media Organisation Changes Narratives
• Hero image source by Press Service of the President of Ukraine / openverse, by-sa.

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