Losing
ground? RT, Guardian & the facts behind BBC cash call
RT,
23
December, 2014
The
Guardian’s latest hatchet job on RT indicts the channel on the
basis of it outspending (and admittedly outgunning) the BBC’s
international radio service.
The
article below was submitted to The Guardian to be published in its
“Comment is Free” opinion section as a response to the
newspaper’s latest, largely unsubstantiated, piece about RT. So far
The Guardian has not published RT’s response.
Evidently
The Guardian has developed an obsession with our channel, publishing
over a dozen articles directly or indirectly about RT in a
month-and-a-half.
The latest
hit-piece disguises
itself as broadly addressing publicly-funded broadcasters from Russia
and China, yet there are no concrete facts or figures mentioned about
any organization, other than RT. According to the Guardian, RT is
coming to get you. And it has piles of cash to do it with. How can
the impoverished BBC even think about competing? No wonder
it's “losing
the information war.”
In
the process of making its scaremongering claim, the Guardian once
again abandons the basic principles of journalism and attempts to
string together several non-facts:
1.
For the sake of drawing a favorable comparison to the poor old BBC,
the Guardian does some creative accounting when converting RT’s
ruble-denominated budget for 2015 into British pounds, and comes up
with a figure of £220 million instead of £175 million – the
number that should be fairly easy to get right simply by plugging in
RT’s budget into an online pound-ruble
conversion calculator.
Having inflated the sum by nearly 30 percent, the Guardian then draws
the comparison between RT and the BBC World Service – the only
other budget figure quotes in the entire piece. The article is filled
with the former Beeb chief’s fears and lamentations about financial
disadvantage, even though, at £245 million per year, the service is
outspending RT by almost 50 percent on radio and online platforms
alone.
World Service fears losing information war as Russia Today ramps up...
2.
Nonsensically, the Guardian decides to compare the international
broadcasting expenditure of the BBC World Service and RT – radio
vs. television platforms – entirely ignoring the quintessential
operating difference: the fact that any kind of TV broadcasting
incurs massive expenditure on transmitting video signal via
satellite, something that radio services never have to consider. It
would be much more fitting to compare the BBC World Service budget to
that of other international radio services, but the Guardian is far
too carried away with its arguments to consider facts. As such, it
only mentions other radio services in passing, vaguely and without
specifics, instead choosing to concentrate on RT as the “big
bad” coming
for susceptible British minds with its endless resources.
3.
In this context, if the Guardian really wanted to make a sound
comparison, it would be far more fitting to pit RT against BBC World
News, the UK’s global TV news network. Positioned as an independent
organization, BBC World News nevertheless has been doing the UK
government’s bidding on foreign policy on television sets around
the world for more than two decades, faithfully following the
official line of the UK Foreign Office in international affairs –
just peruse its coverage of the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia, the
Arab Spring or the conflict in Ukraine. And compared to the
transparency of RT, nobody knows how much cash BBC World News is
spending annually on this effort.
4.
Meanwhile, the UK government continues to support the BBC World
Service by funding it through the license fee. Though the concept
sounds fairly free-market, it is anything but. Every British
household that owns a television that they use to receive signal for
broadcast channels – regardless of whether they ever watch the BBC
– must pay a license fee to the UK government (this year, the
figure is £145.50). The government then allocates these revenues to
the BBC and its various media platforms, including, as of April 2014,
the World Service’s radio and online channels.
5.
By the way, the Guardian, which, in its tireless anti-RT efforts, has
taken to referencing anyone spouting anything “damning” about
RT (such as noted “media
experts” Pussy
Riot) without
bothering with verification,
quotes an ex-RT journalist about “average” compensation
figures for RT UK staff. The number cited is, in fact, more than
double what it is in reality, and below what is offered by the BBC,
according to salary comparison site GlassDoor.
Also, the claim that “all
London staff” members
receive a “13th
month” salary
is downright fiction. Moreover, considering that the ex-employee in
question was a reporter and not a management executive, there simply
could be no basis for her to have access to the kind of information
that would allow for the broad statements about compensation
for “average” and “all” RT
UK employees alike. This logical pitfall goes unquestioned by the
Guardian.
But
for the sake of the Guardian’s argument, how does the BBC World
Service fare in the competition with RT on the level-playing field
that is social media? RT is the #1 TV news network on YouTube,
beating the World Service’s channels in every language the services
are offered. RT International also surpasses BBC World Service on
Facebook, and on Twitter by a factor of five.
See
the Guardian’s hatchet piece:
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