Arab World Sees Crackdown on RT as Admission of Role Russian Media Plays 'Conveying Truth to People'

"You've asked questions for months and months about the Global South, and why there's not more support for Ukraine in this part of the Middle East or that part of Latin America or this part of Africa," US State Department Global Engagement Center director James Rubin told reporters at a briefing in Washington on Friday as the US government rolled out fresh allegations and restrictions against the Russian foreign language broadcaster.

"One of the reasons why so much of the world has not been as fully supportive of Ukraine as you would think they would be...is because of the broad scope and reach of RT, where propaganda, disinformation and lies are spread to millions if not billions of people around the world," Rubin said, complaining about Russian media's global reach and ability to get alternative viewpoints across.

Secretary of State Blinken, President Biden and other officials will be "talking" with counterparts "in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia and are going to be working with their colleagues to try to show all of those countries that...to broadcast, with no restriction of control, RT and allow them free access to their countries," and "has had a deleterious effect on the views of the rest of the world about a war that should be an open-and-shut case," Rubin added.

'Shocking' Hypocrisy and Duplicitousness

“These events clearly show that the world has once again been deceived by [US] claims of supporting a free media. Blinken leading the campaign against RT is more shocking than it is surprising, especially since the US is making these accusations against a channel expressing the views of many people around the world, not just in Russia,” Palestinian-British journalist Abdel Bari Atwan told Sputnik.

“The US has a regime closer to a dictatorship than a democracy, and the campaign against RT contradicts Washington’s false claims that it seeks different opinions and democracy, which Americans no longer have,” Atwan suggested.

The Biden administration is “projecting onto RT its own favorite method of using the media for insidious purposes,” Ibrahim Awad, vice president of Lebanon’s National Media Council, told Sputnik.

It’s stunning “that the foreign minister of a superpower has become involved in such a matter, but on the other hand, the US’s deceptive position and attempts to sit on two chairs at once is not surprising,” Awad said.

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Truth Hurts

Nasser Abu Bakr, head of the Palestinian Union of Journalists, says Washington’s assault on RT is an “admission of the role the channel plays in conveying the truth to people.”

The US elite “only wants one version of the world – their version, which entails falsification, lies and propaganda, and they don’t want the world to see the truth, hence the attempts to restrict all free media spreading truth and justice,” Bakr said.

Algerian professor of media studies Hakim Bugrara says the US regularly “undermines the humanitarian and democratic values it claims to defend” when someone falls outside its orbit.

“Washington does not accept the existence of strong media contradicting its position, and the Americans are particularly worried about Russian media, which has enormous reach and distribution, despite all attempts to interfere with its broadcasts.”

Russian journalists have broken through the information blockade with their content and diversity of opinions, and most importantly, offered the world “a different perspective on current events and their underlying causes,” Bugrara said.

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