Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it was summoning the heads of U.S. media outlets in Moscow to a meeting next Monday to notify them of tough measures in response to U.S. restrictions against Russian media.
The narratives advanced by the Kremlin and by parts of conservative American media have converged in recent months, reinforcing and feeding each other. Along the way, Russian media has increasingly seized on Fox News’s primetime segments, its opinion pieces and even the network’s active online comments section — all of which often find fault with the Biden administration — to paint a critical portrait of the United States and depict America’s foreign policy as a threat to Russia’s interests. Tucker Carlson was a frequent reference for Russian media, but other Fox News personalities — and the occasional news update from the network — were also included.
When Marina Ovsyannikova burst into Russian living rooms on Monday’s nightly news, denouncing the war in Ukraine and propaganda around it, her protest highlighted a quiet but steady stream of resignations from Russia’s tightly controlled state-run TV. Above, Lilia Gildeyeva revealed on Tuesday she had left Russia and resigned.
In an echo of the exodus of journalists from Afghanistan after the Taliban swept through the country last year, media executives and editors are engaged in a high-stakes debate about risk in Russia. Is it prudent, they ask their reporters over secure apps each day, to gather news in an increasingly hostile and isolated country? If not, is it feasible to continue from outside its borders?
Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, discusses how the battle in cyberspace is shaping up.
AT&T’s WarnerMedia unit will pause all new business in Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar said in a note to staff on Wednesday. It will cease television broadcasts in Russia, halt new content licensing deals and pause planned theatrical and game releases.
Exclusives
Nielsen said it is examining its operations in Russia at a time when several media companies have elected to shut down their activities there. “Due to the escalating situation in Russia and Ukraine, Nielsen is actively working with its clients and vendors in Russia to pause new business and evaluating a plan for its existing operations in Russia,” the company said in a statement. Nielsen declined to elaborate on whether it was measuring Russia’s state-run media.
Netflix suspended its service in Russia on Sunday, becoming the latest tech company to halt or restrict its offerings in Russia amid Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. “Given the circumstances on the ground, we have decided to suspend our service in Russia,” a Netflix spokesperson said. TikTok announced earlier in the day that it was blocking users in Russia from posting videos on the platform.
New Russian legislation ”appears to criminalize the process of independent journalism,“ BBC director-general Tim Davie says.
The move came after a Russian regulator demanded that the company stop showing ads with what the regulator claimed was false information about the invasion of Ukraine.
The organizers of Mip TV and NATPE are to follow all “government sanctions and policies in each territory where we operate” regarding Russia.
Russian military strikes have targeted a large TV tower in Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv, leaving at least five dead and blocking transmissions of TV channels across the country, according to the BBC and other news outlets. “The channels will not work for a while,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs said in a statement, as reported by CNN. “The backup broadcasting of some channels will be enabled in the near future.”
LONDON (AP) — Facebook said Thursday it removed hundreds of Russia-linked pages, groups and accounts that it says were part of two big disinformation operations targeting users outside the U.S. The social media company said its latest effort to fight misinformation came after it found two networks “that engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior” on Facebook […]
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is acknowledging that Russia-linked email addresses weighed in during the public comment process ahead of the FCC’s net neutrality repeal last year. Pai wrote in a court filing this week that it is a “fact” that a half-million comments were submitted from Russian email addresses during the public comment period, adding that most of those comments were in favor of net neutrality.
With RT agreeing to register, under protest, as a foreign agent in the United States, the Putin government is taking a hard look at CNN, Voice of America and Radio Liberty.
Google has discovered Russian operatives spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads on its YouTube, Gmail and Google Search products in an effort to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a person briefed on the company’s probe says. The ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated entity that bought ads on Facebook, but may indicate a broader Russian online disinformation effort, according to the source, who was not authorized to discuss details of the confidential investigation by Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s communications watchdog has threatened to block the access to Facebook next year if the company does not store its data locally. Alexander Zharov, chief of the Federal Communications Agency, told Russian news agencies on Tuesday that they will work to “make Facebook comply with the law” on personal data, which obliges […]
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Former Minnesota governor and professional wrestler Jesse Ventura says he hasn’t been able to find work since his highly-publicized defamation lawsuit against the estate of “American Sniper” author Chris Kyle, so he will work for Russian TV with a new commentary show. Ventura told The Associated Press on Thursday that he has […]
Russia plans to investigate American media outlets to determine whether they illegally influenced the Kremlin’s 2016 parliamentary elections, according to a Wednesday Moscow Times report. Leonid Levin, head of the legislative Committee on Information and Communication, reportedly said CNN, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were among those being investigated.
Hackers thought to be working for Russian intelligence have carried out a series of cyber breaches targeting reporters at the New York Times and other US news organizations, according to U.S. officials briefed on the matter.
The Walt Disney Co. on Thursday said it had completed a deal to introduce a nationally broadcast version of the Disney Channel in Russia, one of the world’s last big untapped entertainment markets. Disney, which has aggressively tried to crack Russia for years with only modest success, said it would acquire 49% of Seven TV, a broadcast channel that reaches about 40 million households, or more than 75% of Russia’s measured TV audience.
COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) – A reporter for a Russian TV news network says she and her cameraman were wrongfully arrested and jailed by Columbus police as the journalists were covering the arrests of demonstrators outside Fort Benning in western Georgia. Reporter Kaelyn Forde and cameraman Jon Conway, Washington-based journalists for Russia Today, were arrested Saturday […]
