RT, Russia’s English-language propaganda outlet, will register as a “foreign agent”

Russia’s state-owned media outlet, RT, has announced that it will comply with US government demands to register as a “foreign agent” of the Russian government, amid controversy over Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

It’s a move that effectively marks the network, which runs both a website and a cable television channel, as a propaganda outfit for Moscow.

“The American Justice Department has left us with no choice,’’ Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, said in a statement on Thursday. “Our lawyers say that if we don’t register as a foreign agent, the director of our company in America could be arrested, and the accounts of the company could be seized.’’

RT, which began as Russia Today in 2005, is headquartered in Moscow, with English-language studios in Washington, DC, and Europe. Its critics in the US have long argued that its critical and conspiratorial coverage of the American government is motivated by the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests.

Russian officials are furious about the development, and Russian President Vladimir Putin promised last month to reciprocate by placing restrictions on American media outlets in Russia. A senior lawmaker in Russia said on Friday that legislators plan to change regulations on foreign media in order to do so.

US intelligence agencies and Russia experts have long argued that RT’s coverage of American politics and current affairs appear to be driven by Moscow’s political agenda. In January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that identified RT as a primary source of propaganda in the US that was intended to advance Russian interests.

As my colleague Zack Beauchamp explains, the ODNI report found that RT began aggressively producing pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton content starting in March 2016, which was the same time the Russian hacking campaign targeting Democrats began.

And according to the report, top staff at RT’s foreign bureaus are closely linked to the Kremlin.

Robert Orttung, a professor at George Washington University who studies Russian media, told the Hill in September that Russian media operations “are trying to undermine democracy” in the US, and that the Russian government is “using the openness of our system to work against [our democratic system].”

RT, for its part, disputes the accusation that it’s a mouthpiece for the Kremlin, and instead considers itself to be a news operation that provides an alternative take on global events. “Where relevant, RT does present a Russian perspective on current events, but we don’t promote the Russian point of view, we explain it alongside with presenting others,” RT’s deputy editor-in-chief Kirill Karnovich-Valua told the New York Times in October.

RT will be registering as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a World War II-era law that sought to identify and counteract pro-Nazi propaganda. Today it mainly serves as a way of tracking and unmasking foreign influence in the US.

Experts say RT’s new legal status shouldn’t directly interfere with its ability to broadcast its work, but the outlet will now be tightly monitored by the Department of Justice. As the Hill reports, foreign agents have to file biannual reports to the US government that disclose any funding and communication from a foreign client (in this case, the Russian government) meant to influence US policy.

RT will also have to indicate that their content is either bankrolled by the Russian government or expresses its views. It’s unclear how exactly they will convey that, but China Daily, a Chinese state-run media operation that’s registered as a foreign agent in the US, does it with an explanation on its Facebook and About Us pages, the Hill notes.

The RT news comes amid a broader reckoning with Russian influence in the American political process. Twitter and Facebook have recently taken heat for failing to vet Russian government-backed advertising during the 2016 elections. And the FBI and Congress are investigating whether Trump or any of his associates coordinated with the Russian government in a bid to tip the results of the elections.