RT has responded with wit and ridicule to the State Department’s charges and attacks. Approached for comment by CNN, the press office of RT quipped, “We’ve been broadcasting straight out of the KGB headquarters all this time.”
The response continued, “No, but seriously, we’re running out of popcorn to sit and watch what the U.S. government will come up with next about us.” RT has provided a link to a video containing “more details about how RT operates.”
That video, embedded here and originally produced in 2015, is a hilarious sendup of the claims that were made about RT for a decade from its founding in 2005. The video depicts RT’s creative director as a bear (the bear, called Misha, is eating wads of dollar bills as it is briefed on RT’s activities by Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan). It portrays its office cleaning ladies as taking their orders “directly from the Kremlin,” and its foreign staffers as victims chained up in a basement eating rations of McDonald’s hamburgers, delivered by Simonyan, clad in a Red Army uniform.
More seriously, RT Deputy Editor-in-Chief Anna Belkina said this morning that “there is nothing at all surprising” in Washington’s latest accusations. “At this point, it’s amusing to watch what their paranoid minds will come up with next,” she said, adding that since launching in 2005, RT “simply has been doing its job as journalists, bringing to audiences all around the world the stories and voices that the mainstream media wouldn’t allow.”
