RT Launches 24/7 News Channel In Germany

Russ­ian media is report­ing that RT Deutsch, Rus­si­a’s Ger­man-lan­guage media out­let, is launch­ing a new 24/7 live chan­nel that will be broad­cast on YouTube. Accord­ing to an RT Deutsch report:

Decem­ber 11, 2021 Only five days left and then the time has come: The Ger­man-lan­guage branch of RT goes on air and sends 24/7/365 news around the clock, every day. With live news, doc­u­men­taries, reports and enter­tain­ment for­mats, RT enables a fresh and prag­mat­ic view of cur­rent affairs and famil­iar­izes the Ger­man-speak­ing audi­ence with the Russ­ian per­spec­tive on impor­tant events.  So sub­scribe to the “RT auf Sendung” [RT on Air, ed.] YouTube chan­nel and be there live when it kicks off on Decem­ber 16th. [Trans­lat­ed with Google Translate]

Read the rest here.

Ger­man media report­ed ear­li­er that while RT Deutsch failed to obtain a broad­cast­ing license in Ger­many and so major Euro­pean satel­lite oper­a­tors would not broad­cast the chan­nel, the sta­tion can be received via a Russ­ian satel­lite. Accord­ing to a Dig­i­tal Fernse­hen report:

Decem­ber 10, 2021 “RT auf Deutsch” — the awk­ward sta­tion name — has not yet received approval, but the sta­tion is now being test­ed so that it can be freely received via the Express AM 8 satel­lite at the posi­tion 14 degrees west. […] The broad­cast of a Ger­man-lan­guage TV pro­gram has been planned for a long time — the start was planned for Decem­ber. Appar­ent­ly they stick to this sched­ule. How­ev­er, there is no broad­cast­ing license for this. An attempt by the Lux­em­bourg author­i­ties failed some time ago. TV providers require a broad­cast­ing license for nation­wide pro­grams in Ger­many. Due to the reject­ed license appli­ca­tions from the broad­cast­er, it can cur­rent­ly be assumed that the major Euro­pean satel­lite oper­a­tors Astra and Eutel­sat will not broad­cast it via their satel­lite sys­tems. [Trans­lat­ed with Google Translate]

Read the rest here.

RT Deutsch (aka RT DE) launched its web­site in 2014. The chan­nel has not received a Ger­man broad­cast­ing license because broad­cast­ing licens­es require state inde­pen­dence. In Sep­tem­ber, YouTube delet­ed two RT Deutsch chan­nels for upload­ing con­tent that vio­lat­ed YouTube’s COVID mis­in­for­ma­tion policy.

RT has been YouTube’s most-watched Eng­lish news chan­nel world­wide for some time, and its Eng­lish and Span­ish chan­nels remain among the 100 most viewed YouTube news chan­nels.

In 2017, the NYT char­ac­ter­ized RT (for­mer­ly Rus­sia Today) as follows:

Ana­lysts are sharply divid­ed about the influ­ence of RT. Point­ing to its minus­cule rat­ings num­bers, many cau­tion against over­stat­ing its impact. Yet focus­ing on rat­ings may miss the point, says Peter Pomer­ant­sev, who wrote a book three years ago that described Russia’s use of tele­vi­sion for pro­pa­gan­da. “Rat­ings aren’t the main thing for them,” he said. “These are cam­paigns for finan­cial, polit­i­cal and media influ­ence.” RT and Sput­nik pro­pel those cam­paigns by help­ing cre­ate the fod­der for thou­sands of fake news prop­a­ga­tors and pro­vid­ing anoth­er out­let for hacked mate­r­i­al that can serve Russ­ian inter­ests, said Ben Nim­mo, who stud­ies RT for the Atlantic Coun­cil. What­ev­er its impact, RT is unques­tion­ably a case study in the com­plex­i­ty of mod­ern pro­pa­gan­da. It is both a slick mod­ern tele­vi­sion net­work, dressed up with great visu­als and styl­ish pre­sen­ters, and a con­tent farm that helps feed the Euro­pean far right. View­ers find it dif­fi­cult to dis­cern exact­ly what is jour­nal­ism and what is pro­pa­gan­da, what may be “fake news” and what is real but pre­sent­ed with a strong slant.