Read Online Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev - Free Book Online

virtue of the West. And then the financial crash undermined any superiority they felt the West might have. All the words that had been used to win the Cold War—“freedom,” “democracy”—seemed to have swelled and mutated and changed their meaning, to become redundant. If during the Cold War Russia gave the West the opposition it needed to unify its various freedoms (cultural and economic and political) into one narrative, now that the opposition has disappeared, the unity of the Western story seems unwound. And in such a new world, what could be wrong with a “Russian point of view?”
    “There is no such thing as objective reporting,” the managing editor of Russia Today once told me when I asked him about the philosophy of his channel. He had been kind enough to meet me in his large, bright office. He speaks near-perfect English.
    “But what is a Russian point of view? What does Russia Today stand for?”
    “Oh, there is always a Russian point of view,” he answered. “Take a banana. For someone it’s food. For someone else it’s a weapon. For a racist it’s something to tease a black person with.”
    As I left the office I noticed a bag of golf clubs and a Kalashnikov leaning by the door.
    “Does it scare you?” asked the managing editor.
    It took a while for those working at RT to sense something was not quite right, that the “Russian point of view” could easily mean “the Kremlin point of view,” and that “there is no such thing as objective reporting” meant the Kremlin had complete control over the truth. Once things had settled down it turned out that only about two hundred of the two-thousand-or-so employees were native English speakers. They were the on-screen window dressing and spell-checkers of the operation. Behind the scene the real decisions were made by a small band of Russian producers. In between the bland sports reports came the soft interviews with the President. (“Why is the opposition to you so small, Mr. President?” was one legendary question.) When K, a twenty-three-year-old straight out of Oxford, wrote a news story in which he stated that Estonia had been occupied by the USSR in 1945, he received a bollocking from the head of news: “We saved Estonia,” he was told and was ordered to change the copy. When T, straight out of Bristol, was covering forest fires in Russia and wrote that the President wasn’t coping, he was told: “You have to say the President is at the forefront of fighting against the fires.” During the Russian war with Georgia, Russia Today ran a banner across its screen nonstop, screaming: “Georgians commit genocide in Ossetia.” Nothing of the kind had been, or would ever be, proven. And when the President will go on to annex Crimea and launch his new war with the West, RT will be in the vanguard, fabricating startling fictions about fascists taking over Ukraine.
    But the first-time viewer would not necessarily register these stories, for such obvious pro-Kremlin messaging is only one part of RT’s output. Its popularity stems from coverage of what it calls “other,” or “unreported,” news. Julian Assange, head of WikiLeaks, had a talk show on RT. American academics who fight the American World Order, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, antiglobalists, and the European Far Right are given generous space. Nigel Farage, leader of the nonparliamentary anti-immigration UKIP party, is a frequent guest; Far Left supporter of Saddam Hussein George Galloway hosts a program about Western media bias. The channel has been nominated for an Emmy for its reporting on the Occupy movement in the United States and is described as “antihegemonic” by its fans; it is the most watched channel on YouTube, with one billion viewers, and the third most watched news channel in the United Kingdom, and its Washington office is expanding. But the channel is not uniformly “antihegemonic”: when it suits, RT shows establishment stalwarts like Larry King, who hosts