In March of 2014 I published an article on these pages (Radio Free Russia) on a newly discovered daily news source - RT America, now available live online and through some cable providers (Time Warner carries it). Headline news runs for thirty minutes at the top of the hour all day long, with documentaries and in depth coverage taking over for the following half hour. Since those early days RT America, which airs from Washington DC and London, has expanded its international news coverage and added nightly programs featuring the refugee progressive journalists from MSNBC, the network that abandoned the progressive format it touted in the Keith Olbermann era. (During the 2016 primaries I never heard Bernie Sanders name mentioned on any of their nightly programs - as though the leader in the polls did not even exist.) RT's nightly news broadcast, Thom Hartman's The Big Picture, covers the lead stories of the day with interviews and panels, followed by Ed Schulz, the pro-labor firebrand of radio and pre-Hillary MSNBC fame. Twice weekly RT programs a comedy news program, Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp, modeled on Jon Stewarts' The Daily Show at Comedy Central. Over the last six months I have found Camp's show to be more informative on some key stories than any other news programming on television. (Extensive coverage of the election fraud in the Democratic primary got me hooked). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Chris Hedges, does a weekly interview program, On Contact, giving progressive movements and leaders a media voice never heard on MSM in the US. And former CNN stalwart, Larry King, continues to interview influential personalities on his late night show. Boom Bust covers financial markets daily, with Max Keiser offering a much more unorthodox view of same in the weekly Keiser Report. Going Underground, which airs from London, did a full hour interview with Wikileaks' Julian Assange from inside the Ecuadorian embassy. (It was in that interview that Assange implied that the murdered DNC worker, Seth Rich, was the source of the DNC leaks furnished to Wikileaks). The jewel of RT's programming is its flagship program, Crosstalk: expert panel discussion of critical international issues, where Ray McGovern and Pepe Escobar are frequent contributors. For an understanding of what is at stake in the Syrian war, there is no better media source.
While Secretary Clinton loves to portray RT as a Pravda-style propaganda network, nothing could be further from the truth. It is remarkably balanced, neutral, and low on rhetorical volume. For propaganda one has to tune in to CNN, Fox news, MSNBC, and yes, even NPR. Sad to say, but that's the way it is. Mainstream US media is the new Pravda.
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