"The provider company that aired our broadcast in Washington threw us out of the broadcast network," Simonyan said via Twitter on Thursday. "Yes, because of our ‘foreign agent' status."
— Маргарита Симоньян (@M_Simonyan) March 29, 2018
RT was compelled to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) last November. RIA Global LLC, a US company producing content for Sputnik News, was also recently forced to register as a "foreign agent."
— Маргарита Симоньян (@M_Simonyan) March 29, 2018
"RT will continue broadcasting in Washington on other platforms," Simonyan said. RT's final program in Washington will air March 31.
As Peter van Buren, a former foreign service officer at the US State Department, recently explained to Radio's Sputnik's Loud & Clear, "FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, has been repurposed wrongly [and] nefariously in order to shut down dissenting opinions here in the United States that are promoted by foreign media sources."
"FARA was designed to formally label Nazi agitators as members of the German government so that their actions could be tracked and that their influence on America could be better understood," Van Buren told show host John Kiriakou.
"Fast forward to 2018, the American government is now aggressively using FARA as a way of labeling media that has some sort of state funding… in this case we're talking about Al-Jazeera, but also about RT and others," he added, including Sputnik.
