Anchor Away!

Liz Wahl, the RT America host who resigned on air yesterday in protest against the network’s biased coverage of Ukraine, gives Jamie Kirchick an inside look at the network’s editorial agenda:

Wahl, for her part, says that while the Kremlin influence over RT isn’t always overt, that journalists there understand what they have to do to succeed and fall into line accordingly. “I think management is able to manipulate the very young and naïve employees,” she says. “They will find ways to punish you covertly and reward those that do go along with their narrative.” …

Wahl recalls a story she attempted to report about last year’s French intervention in Mali, aimed at repelling an al-Qaeda takeover of the country.

She interviewed a Malian man who “talked about what it was like to live under sharia law, people getting limbs amputated…And I thought it was probably one of the best interviews that I’ve ever done. I was touched by what he said as a first hand source, but he also talked about how the French were well-received there and how they were waving French flags and how they should have come sooner, how grateful a large part of the population was, having seen people being literally tortured and having their limbs cut off.”

That story, however, didn’t fit the RT narrative, which portrays every Western military intervention as an act of imperialism while depicting Russian ones as mere humanitarian attempts at “protecting” local populations, as the network constantly describes Moscow’s role in Crimea. Needless to say, Wahl’s interview with the thankful Malian never aired. “I was told after that it was a ‘weak’ interview,” Wahl said.

Allahpundit asks the obvious question:

Good for her, although I wonder what she expected when she went to work for RT. Her boss invaded Georgia a few years ago; his feelings about Ukraine being a de facto Russian province aren’t a secret. What did she think was going to happen? If he had laid off on invading but sought to crush Ukraine economically and politically to stop the phantom Nazi menace in Kiev, would that have been more acceptable?

Dan Wright is even less understanding:

After one of her colleagues Abby Martin got great press when she condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Wahl decided she had had enough (of not being famous). So she went into a monologue about how her family had some mixed background where parts were from Hungary and other parts were not and that one her parents was a veteran and her partner works for the US military (it was less than perfectly coherent) then finished with an on air resignation.

Wahl was shocked (shocked!) to be working for a media organization that promoted a pro-Russian perspective despite it being owned and operated by the Russian government to provide a pro-Russian perspective.

Meanwhile, Ravi Somaiya notes that Wahl was not the first RT-er to quit over Russian whitewashing:

William Dunbar, a British journalist … started working for RT in 2008, when he was 23. He knew he would struggle to overcome the channel’s editorial line, he said, but “I was confident at the time that I would be able to fight my corner.”

That moment arrived, he said, when he was in Georgia as Russian bombs began to fall in the summer of 2008. He mentioned reports of the bombs in a phone interview with the studio, he said, and was quietly told that those mentions were responsible for his being kept off the air. He had previously seen reporting critical of Russia held off the air, and studio commentary that ran counter to his reporting. He recalls that Georgian staff members, who were likely to find such edicts hard to stick by, were given paid leave.

After seeing footage of destroyed apartment blocks in Georgia and photos of the dead, Mr. Dunbar said, he found he “was not allowed to report it,” but was instead asked to divert to stories that served Moscow. He resigned.