I worked for a time in 2007 with The Real News, then based in Toronto, which aimed to be a genuinely independent media outlet. I began to suspect that RT and RT America were allowed to blossom in part because a pretext could always be found to pull the plug on them. But there RT’s offices were - rows and rows of producers and other workers. government had shut down Press TV’s offices in DC. In all honesty, I was surprised at first when I saw RT’s substantial operations in DC. After our talk turned to politics, he excitedly told me about this great outlet he was watching for news - RT. I remember chatting with an elderly man several years ago in rural Maryland who I happened to strike up a conversation with in a store. There were at best minimal efforts to oppose this on First Amendment grounds.īut RT America was different from many of these in that RT America reached a lot of people. was sentenced to at least five years in prison. In 2008, a New York man who was trying to make Al-Manar, a TV station backed by Hezbollah in Lebanon, available to people in the U.S. The mechanism for this was sanctions that were placed on Iran - thus, sweeping sanctions can be used effectively as an instrument against the First Amendment. The following year, the Biden administration seized the domains for Press TV and over 30 others on similar grounds.
For example, in 2020, the Trump administration seized the internet domain for the American Herald Tribune, claiming it was controlled by Iran. Contrary to the common mantra that Big Tech platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter get to decide what content they want, Strossen argues “Private sector actors are directly bound by constitutional norms, including the First Amendment” if they are being coerced by or colluding with the government.Īnd direct censorship has been done by the U.S. And indeed, as with Big Tech censorship generally, sometimes the collusion is outright, see my interview last year with Nadine Strossen, former head of the ACLU. are completely different from the European Commission recently banned RT and Sputnik.īut it more clearly highlights the congruence of government and major corporate agendas. Many will try to argue that the developments in the U.S. Reuters reported: “Tech companies in recent days have moved to restrict Russian state-controlled media including RT and Sputnik in response to requests from governments and calls to prevent the spread of Russia propaganda.” Big Tech firms were also increasingly targeting RT.
The ultimate decision to close was made following a cut off of service by DirecTV and Roku.
The closure of RT America follows effective censorship of the channel.
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