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Last edited by Shahter (2020-09-03 08:35:57)

RT’s UK incarnation claims to ‘challenge dominant power structures’, but whatever might be said about the network’s coverage of Western hypocrisy and venality, the station is institutionally subservient to Russia’s moneyed and political elites. And the coverage of Navalny’s misfortune – far keener to explain hypoglycaemia than contemplate the possibility of an attempted assassination – reflects this in multiple ways. Because, as RT never reports, its editor-in-chief has skin in the game. A couple of months ago, in response to a three-part exposé by the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Simonyan launched a defamation lawsuit against Navalny and his associates.

The complaint turns on RT’s claim to have achieved ten billion YouTube views, and an Anti-Corruption Foundation investigation alleging that the figure was inflated by bots and links to porn sites. The clash has an intensely personal edge. In his first broadside against Simonyan, entitled ‘Parasites’, Navalny ridiculed a trashy television show hosted by her husband. Made using RT facilities but sold for personal gain, it has earned the couple almost £5 million in four years.

Navalny’s follow-up was even more stinging. It claimed that Simonyan was inspired by Putin’s annexation of Crimea to script a patriotic rom-com, so abysmal that not even the state-run Cinema Fund would finance it. The president’s deputy chief-of-staff, Alexei Gromov (who had appointed Simonyan to head Russia Today when she was only 25), stepped in, instructing the Ministry of Culture to give the project a million pounds, no strings attached. The Crimean Bridge: Made with Love! was a commercial disaster and universally panned (except by RT, which called it ‘colourful, interesting and funny’), but Simonyan’s bank balance emerged intact. Almost half the 100 million rubles facilitated by the Kremlin went directly to her and members of her family. Simonyan personally took nine million rubles: about as much as the entire cast earned during the two-month shoot.

RT’s case against Navalny is due in court on 15 September. Another defamation action (brought by the billionaire Oleg Deripaska, whose charitable work Simonyan recently praised) is also imminent. Meanwhile, money-laundering investigations are underway against Anti-Corruption Foundation branches nationwide; a former deputy prime minister is among several well-heeled litigants trying to prevent Navalny disclosing allegations of dishonest enrichment; and a damages award to Yevgeny Prigozhin, another tycoon close to Putin, was so crippling that Navalny recently announced he’d be dissolving the Foundation and restarting under a new name. Prigozhin won’t make that easy: on Tuesday, he let it be known that he intends to reduce ‘comrade Navalny’ to ‘pennilessness and shoelessness’ – unless the comatose man dies first.

It’s evident that many rich and powerful people dislike Navalny. It would take deep stupidity or dishonesty to deny that some want him dead. Official narratives in Russia, like dominant power structures in the West, deserve to be scrutinised accordingly. That’s not about to happen at RT. On the morning after Navalny’s collapse, Simonyan tweeted about his condition eight times, stressing the risk of sudden falls in blood glucose levels. Apparently, she always carries coconut-almond candies, just in case. If only someone had thought to give Navalny a spoonful of sugar, she suggested, he’d have been fine.