Take note: at last, someone has started looking into the real audience and actual effectiveness of Margarita Simonyan's "journalistic" channel, Russia Today.
This outfit received unimaginable sums from the state budget ($2 billion by 2013 alone) and boasts of having a huge audience and of "influencing foreign audiences." But yesterday, the popular website The Daily Beast published an investigation titled "Putin's Propaganda TV Lies About Its Popularity".
The publication found that all the claims about RT's high ratings come from RT itself. There is no independent data. The report RT cites has not been published anywhere.
Simonyan herself responded exactly as expected. She carried out a "journalistic investigation" worthy of her channel and discovered that The Daily Beast piece had been retweeted by some guy from an embassy, then by me, then by Kasparov, then by a foreign journalist:
My God! It's an operation by foreign intelligence services!
Unfortunately, she did not publish the original report from which RT's impressive audience figures were supposedly taken. Instead, she talked about how many views they get on YouTube.
And today, excellent posts by Adagamov came out:
And by Kovalyov:
That is the whole picture in a nutshell. In Russia, you can pump out propaganda because you control the broadcast frequencies, but in a competitive market these guys managed only the standard state-corporation business model: get $2 billion, carve it up, then take other people's videos, slap your logos on them, and show them on YouTube.
That fly-by-night outfit should be shut down, of course.
A reminder that the general rally is on Sunday at 5:00 p.m. on Pererva Street. The nearest metro stations are Maryino and Bratislavskaya.