RT this: How GB News follows Russia Today UK's playbook of conspiracies and controversy...
A former RT UK employee reflects on the early days of the Russian channel's UK operation and how they echo what GB News is selling now.
Previously:
1. Live from the Pratcave: GB News is Britain's least-silenced people saying 'unsayable' things they've said before
2. Welcome to the Errordome: GB News is a clusterfuck but it’s establishment approved and isn’t going away any time soon
3. Hearing from Mike Hunt: GB News and its defenders in the press sound like babies over the boycott…
4. "Please, we're just a smol bean broadcaster...": GB News and Oliver Dowden find common cause in culture war
I’ve agreed to publish this contribution from a former employee of RT UK without a byline as they are still working within the industry.
It’s a weekday morning in the summer of 2014, and I’m in an editorial pitch meeting at a new broadcast media outlet set up to “challenge the mainstream media and its dogmatic narratives”. The room — a mid-level office in London’s Millbank Tower overseeing the entirety of central London, with a birds-eye view of the MI6 HQ — is filled with young and enthusiastic journalists wearing hoodies, trainers and thick-rimmed glasses, carrying coffee cups from Pret a Manger and branded notebooks filled with ideas for the channel’s new shows.
“Government cuts to local schools mean that poor students can’t afford to eat more than one meal a day,” one of the journalists says. The editor — a young British woman who had previously been a co-host on a late-night shopping channel — argues it needs a “unique” angle, suggesting that the journalist and a camera crew head out to the streets of London and ask people whether the government “should increase benefit payments to immigrant children”.
Later on in the meeting, the editor suggests the team write and produce more stories on Britain’s “welfare crisis”, even suggesting a TV reporter heads to Calais to do a live hit on the growing number of refugees living in squalid conditions as they attempt to seek asylum in the UK. “It’s something that our audience is interested in,” she’d often say.
If this type of framing probably sounds familiar, it’s likely that you’ve associated it with the recently launched GB News, a right-leaning TV project fronted by Andrew Neil, with the stated intention of “challenging the dominance of the BBC” and its supposedly “woke” agenda.
Some media analysts have argued that GB News, with its fixation on contemporary culture wars, represents a sea change in Britain’s media landscape. But, from my experience, the channel, far from innovating British media, is treading on old and indeed well-worn ground walked by another news organisation with the same objectives and cultural agenda.
But the channel I am talking about is RT UK, the British offshoot of Russia’s state-funded, internationally-facing Freeview channel. In 2014, RT UK officially launched in London, following a marketing campaign that presented it as “an alternative opinion” — a channel that would have naturally opposed the Iraq War and happily broadcast the unredacted Wikileaks revelations. From the outset, RT framed itself and its target audience as unfairly maligned, “ignored” by elitist mainstream media outlets out of touch with “ordinary” people.
On paper, the job of journalists at RT was to find the untold angle in national and international stories, to give a platform to unconsidered voices with ‘unconventional’ and ‘challenging’ views. Having decided to become a journalist in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s NSA spying revelations, its mission statement spoke to my desire to be a truth-teller.
Besides, coming from an ethnic and religious community that had been ostracised by the British media for decades, and, crucially, having been rejected for a string of unpaid internships at newspapers, taking a paid, low-level producer job that would let me give space to under-represented minorities felt like a dream come true.
It didn’t take long for that dream to sour. In my first few months, any pitches and tips for original stories from me or any of the other idealistic journalists the channel had hired were dismissed, in favour of re-writing sensationalised, reactionary stories from The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent or The New York Post.
At times, these stories would be about important social issues, such as the impact of government cuts, secretive deportations and the UK’s involvement in arms manufacturing and selling weapons to Israel or Saudi Arabia. Indeed, it was often these stories — shared by left-wing activists who would later become key advisors in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party — that would give the channel its reputation as a ‘mouthpiece for the Kremlin’, designed to “destabilise British Politics” and posed such a danger that, according to The Times’ Edward Lucas, any journalist working at RT should be made unhirable elsewhere.
In reality, this kind of story was are — not least because they were unpopular with the channel’s online audience. Instead, as RT sought to grow their Twitter following and Youtube channel, senior editors were encouraged to reproduce stories fixed on the UK’s social and particularly racial anxieties, with amped-up headlines about the UK becoming a “white minority” country by 2050, or Muslim populations growing by ‘75%’, inviting tens of comments calling for forced deportations and internment.
Usually, these stories wouldn’t involve any journalistic investigation or rigour or fact-checking from RT’s hosts or producers. Instead, they would simply mirror the tabloid copy, placing it alongside hastily put together video pulled from wire services, before bringing on a less well-known commentator to back up the sensational elements of the story.
Long before the right-wing media system that produced GB News, RT was the place that happily hosted fringe commentators. It was not just conspiracy theorists but notable names including Colonel Richard Kemp, Martin Sellner (leader of the far-right Generation Identity), Milo Yiannopolous, Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson.
At one point during my short stint at the channel, both Robinson and Hopkins were considered as potential show hosts, not least for their ability to bring their “loyal followings” with them, It wasn’t that the channel outrightly supported these far-right figures actually believed; RT was staffed mainly by liberals with progressive politics, or wealthy, apolitical Russian graduates from American colleges. Nor did the senior staff care all that much about what said personalities' opinions were on Russian politics.
For a channel that had constantly been labelled a source of pro-Russian propaganda by the British broadsheets, the channel output rarely focussed on Russia, preferring instead to fixate on viral tweets and videos or, more often, sensationalised local news stories in the UK, sourced from the tabloid press and fixated on race, religion and sexuality.
If a small group of parents were protesting same-sex education in schools, RT would immediately send a camera crew to film live reactions. Whenever there was a far-right protest, RT would send camera crews and presenters, while its wire service, Ruptly, would live-stream it and allow anyone to comment on Youtube, even if derogatory racial slurs were abundant. It didn’t matter to the channel what kinds of people were watching as long as viewership increased. And it knew that the way to do that was by making people as angry as possible.
It’s been over 5 years since I left RT. In that time, most of its original staffers have quietly moved on to other jobs. Some now work at other media outlets like Sky and the BBC, while others abandoned journalism entirely.
At the time, most of us thought of RT as an outlier in the British media landscape; a channel that, while well-funded, was disorganised and poorly run and less than subtle in presenting itself as an intellectually challenging, non-biased news channel. Even if Al Jazeera and TRT (the Turkish state broadcaster) had specific international perspectives, their operations seemed more considered and professional, and far more in line with the broadcasting standards of the BBC and Sky News.
But we were wrong. RT might have appeared to be an amateur channel — far too fixated in its own grievances to attempt to produce real news — it was ahead of the curve. It knew what broadcast news actually is rather than what the broadcast industry thinks it should be.
RT’s focus on commentary over hard news was calculated on the basis that viewers were less interested in news stories themselves than charismatic commentators — George Galloway, Katie Hopkins and Nigel Farage to name just a few — who could make ‘good’ viral content on YouTube and Facebook. Even as the channel’s online team reproduced other stories from British newspapers on subjects such as finance, housing, and sport, the channel continue to focus on issues we now associate with ‘the culture war’: ‘wokeness’, statues, Muslim migration and, of course, the so-called ‘transgender debate’.
It’s funny to think that back then RT’s presence in the UK was considered an ‘existential’ threat to democratic institutions and that its broadcasting methods were an attempt to ‘divide’ the nation. Not because RT is an innocent broadcaster without a political agenda — far from it — but because it created the blueprint for British broadcasting as it exists today.
News channels are little more than glossy platforms where online personalities are incentivised to be as confrontational and aggressive as possible to expand their ‘brands’. It’s not about channels themselves having audiences, but rather, that channels are dependent on these personalities to bring their followings with them, in the hope that some of them might stick around after their fave has finished their segment.
To put it simply: The RT model was never really about challenging guests or adding depth to ongoing stories about systemic power. It was about being part of as many online influencer circles as possible.
Nowhere is that model clearer than GB News, which has hired several former RT employees, regular commentators and one of its presenters. Since GB News’ chaotic launch (which, funnily enough, mirrored RT UK’s slew of technical failures during its launch week), the channel has consistently promoted manufactured racism rows, sensationalised stories about ‘snowflake students’ and a fair few packages on the England Football team ‘taking the knee’.
Much like the editors of RT UK, GB News seems to be aware that the abundance of gaffes in its first few days doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter whether or not they produce any journalism or how many government ministers they are able to get on air. In fact, it doesn’t matter all that much how many people watch the channel.
At the end of the day, what matters to GB News is that it exists as a part of an expanding right-wing media ecosystem of Youtube channels, podcasts and think tanks with close proximity to the government. If that means bringing in more reactionary commentators from conspiratorial corners of the internet, is the price it needs to pay then so be it.