So now the word is mentioned in the reporting of RT Germany: war. While it was completely avoided last week since Russia started the war on Thursday, it can now be found in the online reports and the live program of the Russian foreign broadcaster. Which truths the broadcaster recognizes and which it doesn’t, and which it mixes into half-truths, is remarkable because RT (formerly Russia Today) belongs to the media company Rossiya Sevodnya, which is financed directly from the Russian state budget. In his reporting, he focuses entirely on Putin’s portrayal and also broadcasts live to Germany – although he was actually already forbidden to do soand although the EU now also wants to take action against the “poisonous and harmful disinformation in Europe” of the state broadcasters RT and Sputnik.
“But what alternative would he have had?” the talk show said on Monday about Putin’s attack on Ukraine Fasbender in conversation on RT DE, addressed by the former East German colonel Bernd Biedermann to the RT presenter Thomas Fasbender, author of a biography of Putin that has just been published by Manuscriptum-Verlag. At the moment it’s not a war, they say, just a “selective military operation.”
The Russian media regulator would be satisfied with this choice of words. On Saturday, Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor said it would ban domestic media from using terms such as “attack,” “invasion,” or “declaration of war” to characterize him. The terms are also to be subsequently deleted from reports, as are references to civilians killed by Russian forces in Ukraine. RT also paints a picture of the war, in which Russia rushes to the aid of the Ukrainian population in order to “demilitarize” and “denazify” the country. In the process, Ukraine becomes a “radical armed anti-Russian instrument in the hands of the West.”
The broadcaster never applied for a license here, which would probably have been hopeless
RT DE has also been broadcasting Putin’s view of things via live stream and satellite reception to Germany since mid-December, to the surprise of the German media regulator at the time. Because the broadcaster has no license in this country to broadcast linear programs. The competent commission for approval and supervision (ZAK) of the state media authorities already had the missing license at the beginning of February objected to and the distribution of the station in Germany is prohibited. RT DE broadcasts a license-based program based in Germany, but has never applied for a license in this country, a spokeswoman told SZ last Friday. However, it would be at least unlikely that the broadcaster would have succeeded in doing so. Because one principle of the German broadcasting license is the remoteness from the state, which should not be given with a parent organization financed from the Russian state budget. The cessation of the linear program ordered by the ZAK affects “all distribution channels” of RT DE, in particular the various live streams.
Nevertheless, RT DE happily continues to broadcast, taking advantage of the protracted nature of legal disputes. The competent RT DE Productions GmbH challenges the ban on ZAK before the Berlin Administrative Court, as the court confirms. The reason: sSe is in reality an “independent production company” and not the “operator of the television station RT DE” based in Moscow. Now it has to be clarified who is actually responsible for the RT DE program. According to the court, the lawsuit “will be decided in the foreseeable future”.
Since Monday, RT DE has hardly broadcast any news, but a lot of documentaries.
(Photo: rt.de, Screenshot: SZ)
The ban on broadcasting actually applies until the decision is made. Unless RT would file an urgent application with the competent court. According to the responsible media authority in Berlin-Brandenburg (MABB), RT DE Productions GmbH has announced this several times, but has so far failed to do so. Because RT continues to broadcast, the MABB has now reacted: it is threatening a fine of 25,000 euros and wants to fix this if RT DE does not stop its linear program by March 4, 2022. RT DE Productions GmbH is “still free to submit an urgent application,” a spokeswoman for MABB told SZ on Tuesday. The process is only about the broadcaster’s linear program via satellite and live streams. Unaffected by this, RT DE can make its content available on demand, which the broadcaster has been doing in Germany since 2014, formerly under the name RT Deutsch.
But the EU is now also trying to ban RT DE and is already having success: On Sunday, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that she would take action against Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik and their subsidiaries. In contrast to the German level, where it is currently only a question of the formal lack of a license, von der Leyen formulated arguments in terms of content: Sputnik and RT will so von der Leyen on Twitter“can no longer spread their lies to justify Putin’s war”.
In the program since Monday: Documentaries instead of current reporting
RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan replied: “We know how to do business in the face of bans. These freedom lovers have been preparing us for this for eight years.” Not a single person “who has worked faithfully for us in any country and continues to work” will be fired.
If you have been watching RT DE’s live program since Monday, you will notice that there is hardly any current reporting anymore. Documentaries in a continuous loop fill the program, on Tuesday the half-hour programs “Syrian Tango” and “Who’s Afraid of the End of the World” are shown again and again. The broadcaster did not respond to RT DE’s inquiries about this until Tuesday.
An incident at a sister company of RT DE gives an indication of a possible reason for this. At the Berlin editorial office of the video news agency Ruptly, also a subsidiary of Rossija Sewodnja, which also supplies RT with content, the employees are now leaving the company in large numbers, as one of them confirms to the SZ. The employee, who wishes to remain anonymous, is on sick leave, like many of his colleagues, as a political protest. Anyone who could afford it financially and was not dependent on a work-related visa resigned immediately, he says.
The big tech companies also want to block the RT DE channels
According to the assessment of the German Union of Journalists Verdi Berlin Brandenburg, the entire middle management of Ruptly has left the company, according to the state manager Jörg Reichel. At Ruptly and RT DE, whose workforces have overlaps, a total of mid-double-digit employees would have given notice or taken sick leave by Tuesday. Not all employees were ideologically involved. Many of them are lateral entrants in the media, not just from Russia or Germany, but from all over the world. They have accepted the editorial line up to now, but according to the employee, not a few would have preferred to work for CNN, BBC or Reuters if it had been possible for them.
On Tuesday morning, the large tech companies also reacted to the action announced by the EU. The operators of Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok and Google want to block the channels of RT and Sputnik with immediate effect at the request of the EU. Even Google, to which the video platform YouTube belongs, is blocking RT and Sputnik channels across Europe with immediate effect, the group said on Tuesday morning. Twitter announced that it would add additional labels to the existing warnings for state media. What is meant are probably new red exclamation marks, which now mark the tweets from RT DE.
Before Tuesday, the operators of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube had gradually increased the pressure on RT in Europe. For example, Facebook restricted advertising funding of RT content. Inquiries from the SZ to RT DE remained unanswered by Tuesday afternoon.