The website and articles have more sober and realistic analysis of the Ukraine situation than any non-explicitly Marxist and/or strongly anti-imperialist news source. So for that they're not bad.
On China they're kind of divided between lightly pandering (far from full on derangement but not really like Chinese state media) to western reactionaries who are their primary audience and honest reporting and analysis that you don't get in the west outside ML sources. They seem to be growing slightly less China skeptical to put it lightly in light of the sanctions and Russia's turn to the east but they're still by no means friendly and repeat many tropes, often under the guise of impartial journalism using passive voice to repeat the claims of the western propagandists and the Chinese response. They'll basically slap together the AP/reuters/NYT/State Dept take along with some caveats and contrary opinions so they tend to be tamer even in this than western wire services.
On domestic issues, on LGBTQ+, on a variety of culture war bullshit like migration they're straight up reactionary because that's who they're pandering to.
Their analysis and opinion pieces seem to me to be strongly slanted towards anti-imperialist and realist center (think Mearsheimer) political thinking but everything else is all over the place. (And of course there are always here and there a few reactionary pieces on culture war stuff on occasion but it's a minority)
All in all as long as you understand that they're a better news source and less infuriating to me than CNN/BBC/NYT, or any of the western sources including wire services to get basic news stuff. I'd say the real reactionary pandering propaganda probably makes up less than a fourth of the feed I get which is by far better than the 2/3rds easily of just straight up State Dept propaganda vomit that I get with western news. And it's such droll reactionary stuff too, it's not foaming at the mouth like you get with Fox News or whatever, they try and put it behind tame, respectable journalist language and quotes to carry the water of the reactionary messaging.
Propaganda on par with like Voice of America, for the most part, but it gives a space for genuine leftist content as long as you roll your eyes when they talk about Russia. With its faults I literally only had a satellite dish to watch RT America and cancelled the moment it was censored. Back in the day Press TV (Iran) and in Spanish teleSUR (Venezuela) are also decent but have their flaws.
It would be amazing to have a channel that is just like an uncompromising full-throated leftist news network.
My “review” will focus mainly on the live news channel. I don’t really read their written website and news articles, but they look terrible from what I’ve seen. Their lgbt articles also read like something out of Der Stürmer.
The live news channel itself has degraded to a depressing level. I used to be excited to watch their morning program while having breakfast, as they would always have a variety of interesting, educational, investigative, or breaking stories presented in a streamlined manner so you could skip around and choose what you want to watch and learn about. The content was purely factual, a little dry, but informative and unbiased from a western perspective.
Nowadays it is quite literally just a copy of Fox News. It’s not even funny. The “news” has been replaced with an unending stream of “news related talk shows”, with pundits just yelling at each other and spewing reactionary garbage. A vast majority of the time if Fox runs a story, RT will copy it the very next day. Their hosts have gone from experts in specialized fields and investigative journalists, to talk show pundits copying Tucker one for one. They even use the same talking points, and if I have to hear a reactionary bourgeoisie Russian, talking about the “Great Replacement Theory” one more time, or how LGBT people are the scum of the earth and should be eradicated, I will throw my computer out of my window.
I think this was caused by them catering to an American audience and giving that audience what they want to hear. I've noticed a similar (but less extreme) degeneration in the quality of the content of CGTN America (mind you, this only applies to the America branch, as the main international CGTN channel is still very professional and serious), except they went in a liberal direction instead of a conservative one like RT.
Before they were banned out of most of Europe RT were a valuable source of alternative news, the only bigger channel that presented a different viewpoint than the mainstream European media, which without exception keeps to a strict discipline where they all parrot the NATO-EU liberal Atlanticist line in unison. It's actually impressive how controlled the media is in Europe, there really is no word to describe what has happened other than the old Nazi concept of "Gleichschaltung"...but i digress...
Anyway, now that RT are left with only the US as their main Western audience this has massively dumbed them down, and it has turned them into an almost carbon copy of conservative US media. There are occasionally a few programs or guests on there that have something interesting to say that you don't get elsewhere, and where they actually fairly represent the Russian viewpoint which is very much suppressed nowadays in Western media, but mostly you just roll your eyes.
Yes you can still stumble onto a good clip from RT here and there, but i think generally you're better off just going and reading actual Russian news and keeping an eye out for interesting programs from Russian media that someone was nice enough to clip and translate.
I agree with essentially everything you said, however, I will give a slight clarification and say that I was referring to the domestic RT created for the Russian market, and not the English/American centered branches; as I am Belarusian, and thus speak Russian.
This is why I found the Americanization of the channel even more infuriating, as RT has become a literal carbon copy of Fox News except in Russian. Feeding the most disgusting and reactionary elements of American conservative talking points directly to the Russian population and the Russian overseas diaspora. What was once an amazing source of news is now worse then tabloid drivel. At best I’ll roll my eyes, or at worst I’ll feel like I’m listening to a Mien Kampf audiobook.
It got to the point where when my sweetheart Babushka told me about how the chemicals they were putting in chocolate are turning children trans as part of a plot to destroy America by infecting it with degenerate values and reducing the white population…. I had a small aneurysm before promptly setting up parental controls to block the channel on her TV and telling her the channel signal was having issues.
I didn't even know that RT was big in Russia itself, i thought it was mainly an export product so to speak. It's disconcerting to hear that Russians are getting fed this Americanized slop. I knew that Russia has plenty of its own domestic reactionary media but i assumed at least it would have an authentically Russian character to it. It really doesn't need to import American conspiracy theories and the American style of media programming, that's just another form of cultural colonization. It's good that Russians by and large realized that Western liberalism is a detrimental cultural import, now they need to realize the same thing about Western conservatism as well.
