RT America, You Were Very Weird and Bad

You can still watch Russian-propaganda television if you really want to. RT, the English-language news network funded by the Kremlin and based in Moscow, was dropped from YouTube and American cable in early March, but still appears on an assortment of alternative video-hosting platforms, where reporting on the war is described as a “special operation chronicle.” What you won’t find, though, on any television or social-media site, are the thousands of hours of programming that RT filmed and broadcast over the past 12 years from its production site down the street from the White House. RT America, as this bureau was called, has been all but erased from the internet.

For a reporter, this is frustrating. RT America was so weird, and that’s the first thing anyone would need to know about it. But its weirdness is much harder to explain if you can’t look at any of its deeply weird clips. From the start, the channel was staffed by has-beens, oddballs, and extremely young people—which is to say, by American journalists who might have had a hard time finding work at other outlets, or who were mad at CNN and The New York Times, or who harbored an interest in conspiracy theories of one sort or another. These journalists and the guests they featured brought together perspectives and positions pulled from both ends of the political spectrum; the far left and the far right shared outrage over being censored and mocked by the mainstream, and agreed that nearly all information produced by the U.S. government was suspect. But the news that RT America produced wasn’t merely (or wasn’t always) tinged with an anti-U.S. ideology. It also had a wild, shameless inconsistency.