Re: Some of the most hardline British and U.S. right wing nuts are regulars on RT. Archived Message
Posted by brooks on September 30, 2020, 11:54 am, in reply to "Re: Some of the most hardline British and U.S. right wing nuts are regulars on RT."
RT’s much more open, pragmatic, and consensual view is actually the longstanding view amongst Communists, and reflects the Marxist-Leninist heritage that’s there in today’s Russia. Here's a glimpse of what's left of that so-called Marxist heritage: Three percent of the Russian population controls 89 percent of the country’s financial assets. Ninety-eight Russian billionaires have more wealth than the combined savings of the entire population of 144.5 million people. Real incomes have been falling for years and are expected to further decline as an estimated five to six million workers are expected to find themselves jobless by the end of the year. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/10/russ-j10.html As a state-funded broadcaster, RT - like any other state media - would be expected to have an ideological slant that reflected the actually existing power/wealth distributions in that state. And that expectation is generally fulfilled when you look at its increasingly reactionary editorial line. Unlike western state media it does give a platform to left-wing dissidents, but these are generally western journalists like Chris Hedges, Lee Camp and Afshan Ratansi who focus on the crimes of their own states and of US imperialism generally. Because the west has purged such critics from corporate and state media, RT provides a very useful service, but we shouldn't have any illusions about its motives or how tenuous the position of those dissidents is within that network. People like Hedges challenge not just the crimes of empire but the ideological foundations of state-corporate power everywhere and his position within RT is far from secure. He'll be shut down the moment his employer decides the costs of permitting such heresies outweigh the benefits of airing US dissent. Personally I doubt that's far off, but I hope I'm wrong.
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