Fox News-Russia Today: A Reply to Catherine Fitzpatrick

Yesterday’s post comparing Russia Today to Fox News provoked an impassioned rebuttal. Russian translator, blogger and Second Life estate agent Catherine Fitzpatrick of Minding Russia berated me in a comment for ‘prettifying RT’ and ‘mislead[ing] the public’.

What follows is one man’s quest to set the record straight.

Dear Catherine,

Thank you for your spirited comment. Because I agree with most of your criticisms of Russia Today, I am having some trouble connecting them with my piece.

For example, you somehow accused me of ‘prettifying’ RT and ‘mislead[ing] the public, and challenged me to “explain what about RT’s coverage departed from the official line”.

But I don’t remember having ever asserted anything of the sort. In fact, I took care to explain that even when RT “quotes and interviews researchers from the liberal-atlanticist Carnegie Center”, it does this only “when the soundbites are uncontroversial/suit the state narrative”.

In addition, I stated very clearly that not only is RT “funded by the government and supervised by Russian state media service RIA Novosty” but also that it is “widely considered to be “a Kremlin project to improve Russia’s image around the world”, accused of airing obscure conspiracy theorists to promote an anti-Western agenda”.

Moreover, all the articles to which I linked were unanimously critical of the channel, so I struggle to see your interpretation of my piece as some sort of RT hagiography.

As to whether RT has a provocative take, your own (justifiably outraged) comment:

“Any discussion about human rights activists murdered in the Caucasus like Natalya Estemirova? Any discussion about Kadyrov’s reign of terror? (Lavelle even had the temerity to say “Say what you will about Kadyrov, but it’s quiet down there lately”

demonstrated that it certainly succeeded in provoking you.

Remember, RT’s target audience is not Russians, but foreigners; in contrast to the Russian language media which is almost wholly pro-Kremlin, such a viewpoint among the contemporary English language press, which tend to be critical of the Russian state, fits the very definition of an alternative and provocative take.

True, RT said nothing about Estemirova. But how many mainstream Anglophone outlets have questioned the propriety of nuclear superpowers America and Israel lecturing Iran over the nuclear issue? Wherever you stand on this issue, it is an example of RT provoking debate and challenging established Western thinking.

Yet my main issue with your response is the following:

You write that “this isn’t a discussion about Fox News. It’s a discussion about RT”. But actually, my article was specifically a discussion of both RT and Fox News, as the headline, “Russia Today: The Kremlin’s Fox News?” unambiguously indicated.

I also find somewhat puzzling your likening a dispassionate comparison between two networks to a ‘moral equivalence game’, particularly when I made no moral judgements about either one.

That aside, the central argument of my piece – which I apologise for perhaps not having made very clear – is that Russia Today and Fox News share a common psychological base, or ‘origin myth’: a rather paranoid and besieged view of the world, a desire to correct the record and align it more closely to their respective ideologies.

I then quote a CJR article in which Terry McDermott describes “a loopy self-absorption to this that is peculiar to Fox and that derives from its origin narrative as the network for the unrepresented, for the outsiders. There is a strain of resentment, of put-upon-ness that pervades almost everything Fox puts on the air”.

This is followed by my conclusion that “in its obsession with Western ‘misrepresentation’ of a Russia struggling to be heard above the lies and calumny of its foes, McDermott could easily have been describing Russia Today”.

Note that this last sentence is hardly a rousing endorsement of RT.

I agree with you that Russia Today does not offer an alternative take from the Kremlin narrative.

But what both RT and Fox do do is offer an alternative take from what each perceives to be received wisdom; in Fox’s case the enemy is the ‘liberal media’ and for RT it is the ‘Western media’. This is my observation. What it is not is a comment on the validity of that take or the veracity of its raison d’etre.

But if I were to comment, I would say that while both are fairly dubious, there is far less basis for believing in a ‘liberal media bias’ than there is for believing that Western media have generally not treated Russia with the same sort of forced objectivity reserved for other subjects.

And while a number of very reputable media critics, scholars and theorists (McChesney, Bagdikian, Chomsky and Herman, and Alterman, to name just as few) have convincingly debunked the liberal media fallacy, several media students have found a predisposition of mainstream Anglophone media towards an anti-Russian slant (see also my analysis of the western media coverage during the Russia-Georgia war).

To sum up: is there room among the Western media for a more considered and nuanced Russia narrative, one that could sometimes happen to align with the Kremlin’s interests?

Do we need more interviews with people like Vanden Heuvel, Fred Weir, Mark Ames, Stephen Cohen and Boris Kagarlitsky in the English-language press? Emphatically so.

That is why the demise of the Exile was such a tragedy.

However, as I have emphatically stated in the past, a state-run pro-Kremlin channel is hardly the best way to fill that niche and reverse these negative narratives, because the truth should be strong enough to stand up on its own.