MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Western media are putting direct financial pressure on the RT broadcaster by calling up its advertisers and urging them not to sponsor "the Kremlin propaganda," RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said.
"There is a wonderful UK outlet that has called up all our advertisers in the United Kingdom and simply put them to shame, rebuked them, saying shame on you, you are sponsoring the Kremlin propaganda by advertising through a such-and-such broadcaster. Some of the advertisers left, naturally, having been scared away, because nobody wants bad publicity… This is direct financial pressure," Simonyan said in an interview that will be aired on Russian NTV channel on Monday night, without specifying which UK media she was referring to.
She added that the The Wall Street Journal newspaper contacted US cable operators providing access to RT "trying to convey the same message: shame on you, you are spreading the Kremlin propaganda, you should immediately terminate the contacts."
"Understandably, someone will get scared and will not renew a contract with us as soon as it becomes possible, because they are in it for business. They do not want to be enmeshed in a scandal, to be written about, in general, and to get bad press, in particular," Simonyan said.
The RT editor-in-chief added that these tactics had not crippled RT's revenue and had instead exposed new viewers to the broadcaster, people who "would not have come [to RT] otherwise, not its target audience."
"[The media] do not understand that the more they try to undermine us, the more they advertise us, the more people who see that think, hey, why is everyone piling up on [RT], let's see what is really going on," Simonyan said.
Russian media have often been taken to task lately. In November, the European Parliament passed a resolution where it described the RT as a threat to Europe’s unity and drew a parallel between the broadcaster and propaganda disseminated by Daesh, a terrorist group outlawed in many countries, including Russia.
In a comment on the EP motion, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the channel for doing a good job and said the resolution showed that the Western concept of democracy was apparently degrading.
