(c) Jaap Arriens/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.I personally know many people who work at RT, and I have known some of them for over 20 years. When we first met in the “stormy 1990s”, some of them, like myself, were working for foreign TV bureaus in Moscow, others for independent radio. All those aspiring young people were enthusiastic, cosmopolitan, spoke a number of languages and loved bourgeois traits (which, yes, includes golf).
These boys and girls eventually hit western media’s glass ceiling. In the early 2000s, the big TV and news media bureaus in Moscow were curtailed — either due to economic constraints or decreasing interest in Russia. Very few of the capable producers, field reporters and editors continued their careers at the BBC, Australia’s ABC News, German public service broadcaster ZDF or Reuters. Western media, once enchanted with perestroika and glasnost’, and later the seismic events of the Yeltsin era, trained and taught this “local staff”, myself included. In the 2000-2004 period, most of these people lost their comfortable jobs, failed to qualify for transfers to other countries or find places for themselves at the Moscow offices of other foreign media outlets.
A decade later, most of them were working for Russian state television and other state media such as the newly born Russia Today. Today, they are the bosses and leaders of this TV channel, which is now regarded as a major threat to western democracy.
