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Comment by dagenleg | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. RT is very biased, but is fairly factual once you learn to ignore the bias. They do a lot of pretty impressive journalistic work, like frontline reporting. If you exclude it completely, you miss a big part of the picture.

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RT factual? You must have not been following their Ukraine coverage. They're likely the biggest liars of all mainstream media. They were somewhat OK until the Ukraine crisis started, that's when they started going full-retard.

RT published an article about the Ukrainian army shooting down that Malaysian passenger plane. I am not sure if it still exists, but I have read it on their web site. Then they quickly started changing their story in followup articles, but never actually published the truth about it (unless they published it since I stopped reading them, but I seriously doubt it).

The RT mentality seems to be "the truth doesn't matter, perception is everything". It is hard to find even a hint of journalistic integrity in their work. This is far beyond being "biased". Yeah, pretty much everyone is biased, but not in the despicable way RT is.

Frankly, compared to internal Russian and Ukrainian news they were the epitome of unbiased journalism. The Ukrainian coverage was and is very subjective, but they did not resort to outright lies much more than media usually does.

Malaysian plane is a very good example of this - they were floating a lot of mad theories absolving Moscow of any guilt but in the end they were still reported just as "versions". It's very hard to catch a media company on outright lies because of such evasive tactics.

Yes, there are even worse pieces of trash than RT somewhere out there. There's a paper in my country that claims the Earth is flat, that's not the sort of media I am comparing RT to because I don't trust those papers at all either.

The New Gazette (Gorbachev's paper) is internal Russian media and did not run a full retard propaganda campaign on this issue. They printed "Forgive us, Netherlands" on their cover page. This is the paper that has had something like 5 journalists assassinated in the last decade for actually doing their job.

By presenting RT as somehow not particularly bad you are lowering the bar all the way to the ground and disrespecting thousands of honest journalists who work hard to inform the public about the wrongdoing of those in power. None of those people work for RT. RT is a pure propaganda paper. Journalists in my country have taken down people in our government and even sent them to prison by relentless digging for the truth. They have been killed in their pursuit of justice. Throwing actual journalists into the same basket with RT indicates an extremely warped perspective.

I don't think I would be too wrong to group RT journalists with the same people who instigated the Iraq war or the Libya fiasco. Sorry, but the western media that reported on "Gadaffi supplying troops with viagra to rape better" is as credible as the Kremlin mouthpiece to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/29/diplomat-gadda...

So I assume you found the worst article you could remember, and even in this article you can at least see traces of journalistic integrity that is completely absent in RT:

> But it is a jump from that to suggesting Gaddafi is supplying troops with it to encourage mass rape.

> US ambassador Susan Rice has also said, without offering evidence, that Iran was helping Syria to suppress dissent

That's some serious mental gymnastics just to argue the old "everyone is the same" line when RT is literally a 100% propaganda paper of the Russian government.

The Guardian specifically was one of the main drivers of both Manning and Snowden leaks. They have earned the right to be called a serious paper.

And Russia was the one who shielded Snowden after his leaks went public. It does not make Putin a valiant defender of the freedom of the press, does it now?

I have seen bending of the truth happening in all major media outlets ever since I started following them, and I honestly don't want to get drawn into the measuring contest of "which newspaper lies the worst" right now. Especially since due to the absence of good metrics we'd have to do what, find and nitpick articles over the last N years? And then we'll have to argue if there are or there are not traces of "journalistic integrity"? Nah, screw that.

It's not nitpicking at all.

Even in the worst example you could cherry-pick for the Guardian, the journalist just reported on something a US official said and explicitly distanced themselves from the more ridiculous claims. This makes them as bad as RT? Ridiculous. The Guardian constantly heavily criticizes their own government, the US government, etc. They are clearly not tools of the people in power.

RT on the other hand just does whatever is in the interest of the Russian government. The only reason it even exists is to try to push narratives favorable for the Russian government to a western audience. They're just a tool.

It requires some serious personal bias in order to see the two papers as the same.

Snowden/Putin is irrelevant as Snowden leaking that stuff was favorable for Putin. At the same time, the Guardian publishing it was not favorable for their government.

New Gazette is english translation, ru-english is "Novaya Gazeta"

The five journalist you mentioned are on this list https://cpj.org/killed/europe/russia/ with over 50 russian journalist killed, and not a single one is from RT, I wonder why...

The things you said apply to most western media. The difference is that RT is basically controlled by the Russian state, while most western media lie for their own profit.

Different media for different purposes. There are many of these highly biased "marginal" media outlets that often contain tidbits of facts that aren't reported elsewhere, and yes, sometimes it's because those facts don't match the (oppositely biased) narrative (and sometimes it's because those facts are indeed not relevant for reporting), and that's useful for surfacing these facts so you can make up your own mind. But this only works for a highly informed reader who is deeply familiar with the subject, so they can sift through the bias and pull out the facts.

BUT -- they are emphatically worse than useless for getting high-level acquainted with an unfamiliar subject, which seems to be what's at stake here.

You are assuming that there's a way for an uninformed reader to get his hands on 'unbiased' media. If you don't sift through the biases yourself the "high-level acquaintance" you acquire will be inevitably biased, since someone had to do it for you.

That's a great excuse for making a semi-totalitarian government mouthpiece look like it's credible news.

On the contrary, I am saying that there are no credible news to be found. Sure, RT is a mouthpiece, but it's unwise to lock yourself in a bubble where all media you consume follows the same party line.

That argument is about as intellectually sound as saying "evolution is only a theory" (correct) "so creationism is equally valid" (wrong).

("It's bad to be locked into a party-line bubble" (correct) "so it's good advice to add RT and Breitbart to your daily media diet" (wrong))

This is the "honest about lying" trope.

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/honest-about-lying/

> RT is very biased, but is fairly factual once you learn to ignore the bias. If you exclude it completely, you miss a big part of the picture.

It's nothing more than propaganda and disinformation with an agenda.

You have to be very careful. They lie about even relatively inconsequential things. Like particular bombings in Syria.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFQdBHQjPHs

This one is back from the time of the siege of Aleppo last year. Frontline reporting is probably even more biased than anything else. Journalist speaking against the soldiers he's embedded with? What will happen next time he's embedded with any troops?

Correct me if I am wrong, but it's just about the thumbnail inappropriately used in one of the videos. Not about the report itself or the factual errors in it. Just the thumbnail which was probably assigned from some stock of "Syrian war destruction photos". That's sounds more like sloppy work than a deliberate lie.

Also the entire RT reporting about Syria is a factual error. They omit so much, it's ridiculous. Russia last fall/winter killed around 4000 civilians in Syria, before they scaled back this year. Where are detailed reports on those reported on RT?

Google "site:rt.com russia massacres" and have fun finding something perpetrated by Russia's military there, even playing it down as an accident.

It's not a generic stock photo. It's a photo from rebel held areas made just 4 days prior to the report. Clearly labeled as such on the purchase page.

http://pictures.reuters.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2C0...

"ignore the bias" == believe in lies

Individuals, professionalism and reputation is what makes news outlets credible, and real competition between news agencies is the very key for that to work, so without a free press environment, news are unreliable.

https://cpj.org/killed/europe/russia/

See any RT journalists on that list?

Wake up dude

RT is not factual, and many of the facts RT broadcasts are deliberate falsehoods.

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