PATRICK BULGER | Putin’s RT channel: guided missives from the edge of media fantasy

Perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin has been watching too much of his personal propaganda TV channel, RT, which might explain his blundering into a war in Ukraine that has united the free world against him.

How else does one explain the scale of his miscalculation, his epic error?

But even with his apologists pleading with the world to exonerate Putin, cast as a hapless victim  compelled by a history over which he had no say, they’d be doing themselves a favour by focusing instead on the more recent history of the region before they milk the distant decades in search of an excuse for Putin’s immoral war. History that’s five years old has as much and perhaps more force than history with a century of vintage. Or does only old history count?

At some point on Wednesday evening I joined much of the free world as we South African viewers were cut off from RT, which tries to present Putin’s Russia as just another country selling its wares in the marketplace of ideas. The channel used to be called Russia Today, but this been abbreviated to reflect a modern profile and no doubt further to obscure the fact that what you are watching is Russian pay-TV propaganda.

I’ve often watched RT to savour the eccentricity of its presenters, and their astronomical views. They are typically disillusioned US or British journalists who regard the West and its freedoms as somehow a sham, a make-believe construction of Western media, with CNN being the loudest of the running dogs. Being Westerners themselves, they are regarded as experts on the West’s “fake’’ civilisation.

In RT’s view of the world, what you are seeing in front of your eyes is not reality. It’s a Western conspiracy, and it’s being observed without the benefit of a knowledge of ‘history’.

If you’ve never watched RT until now you may have missed the best of it because quite a few of its personnel have left the studio in protest at Putin’s war of lies. It’s got that bad. One concludes that the moral and ethical pliability of its presenters had a breaking point after all. There’s only so much a highly paid media hypocrite can take. Not even Putin’s suppression in his own country and stealthy takeovers of neighbouring territories by men in balaclavas and unmarked uniforms had stirred the consciences of RT’s army of liars in skirts and suits before now. So perhaps it’s not what Putin’s doing that has alarmed them: it’s the reaction that has scared them into disassociating from the dictator.

Here’s another odd thing about RT: despite employing hundreds of people around the world, it doesn’t do news, which is odd for a TV news station. Earlier on Wednesday, I made a point of watching RT to try to get a better sense of why Putin has chosen to walk off the cliff. Of course, as per the dictates of the Kremlin, the words attack, invasion or war are studiously avoided. RT tries to trick the viewer into accepting its credibility and its world view by adopting a strictly “neutral’’ stance. There is no on-day footage of any fighting whatsoever, no displaced people, no missiles, no stalled Russian military column outside Kyiv. And no social media input either.

Instead we are told, almost in passing, that the Russian army is conducting an intervention in a neighbouring country it has decided is run by Nazis and drug addicts. RT reports a war with as much energy as a business channel might report SA’s citrus exports to China.

This is meant to be juxtaposed with the “sensational” CNN that is supposedly pumping out Western propaganda. In reality, though, the journalists of CNN and its affiliates are out in the field, risking their lives to bring you the news.

In RT’s view of the world, what you are seeing in front of your eyes is not reality. It’s a Western conspiracy, and it’s being observed without the benefit of a knowledge of “history’’, which apparently helps the more discerning viewer to see, or not see, what the ordinary man or woman sees as manifest.

To this end, what RT lacks in news it more than makes up with history and perspective. For example, RT’s “coverage’’ of the war on Ukraine consists mostly of slanted features on the disputed Russia-inclined separatist republics on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia. There, we are told, Russian-speaking peoples are being suppressed by Nazi Ukrainians who took power in a “coup’’ in 2014. This is where globalisation has met the reality of culture, an RT stiff in a bow tie tells us hopefully.

Putin and RT like to raise history not as an aid to understanding but as a device to see the world as it could have been, if only certain things and events had not happened, or were not understood in a certain way. You’re urged to look at the past through a prism of deceit and delusion.

Putin and his apologists insist that Ukraine’s joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is non-negotiable, without realising that his threats to the very existence of Ukraine, which he doesn’t regard as a legitimate nation, leave Ukraine with little option but to join Nato and the EU.

With RT going off air, I switched to Netflix where a programme called Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom is being shown, giving a day-to-day account of the Euromaidan revolution that saw the country’s pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych flee Kyiv in the early hours of the morning for exile in Russia in February 2014. Of course, it’s all Western propaganda: the three-month protest at which ordinary people suspended their lives, occupying Kyiv’s main square in mid-winter to force the hand of their pro-Russian government that had agreed and then refused to sign a trade deal with the EU. Their hope and heroism were palpable, evident, inspiring.

It started off as a student revolt, but as Yanukovych’s police ratcheted up the brutality, the protesters became more set on achieving their objectives. They insisted on a future for Ukraine in a free Europe and were prepared to fight for it. The show should be compulsory viewing for members of the South African government and for Putin too. If you watch that, and you still believe Putin can squash the irresistible force that is Ukrainian nationalism, you may be living in a make-believe world. Or a world where only RT was ever showing on your living-room TV.