Also, I don't think people have similar complaints about Al Jazeera's reporting on Russian election campaigns?
Every major country does this, every election, to every other major country. It's something we live with and I don't get the overreaction.
Please don't normalize this kind of behavior. Every country does not do "this". There is no major news agency supported directly by US Federal Funds, except perhaps NPR, but that has been openly critical of the US all the time.
And that is perhaps the test of truly independent news outlet: if its willing to criticize its own Government, if its able to do so, even when the information paints the Govt. in a really bad light.
RT is totally at a different scale. It's clearly being used as a political outfit. Other state-owned media in many countries have rules about editorial independence. RT clearly does not.
Anecdotally, I've literally never heard of this before.
Our news outlets have been caught colluding with certain candidates – federal funds is one of countless vectors in which governments/elites can steer the news. Think of Donna Brazil, for example. She had to leave MSNBC after forwarding debate questions to Clinton.
Voice of America is a major global news agency directly funded by the federal government, which, because of concerns of the government propagandizing it's own electorate, was prohibited from broadcasting directly to American citizens until 2013. (Radio Free Europe, etc., used to part of a separate federal government office, too.)