Foxtel Suspends State-Sponsored Russian Channel RT Over Ukraine Coverage

Caroline Frost
·2 min read

Foxtel in Australia has become the latest broadcaster to suspend transmission of the Kremlin-backed RT channel in the region.

A spokesperson for Foxtel, co-owned by News Corp Australia and Telstra, announced the decision to make the channel unavailable on Foxtel and Flash, citing concerns about the quality of its reporting on the Ukraine invasion, with viewers being told Russian troops were trying to liberate Ukraine. RT stopped streaming early Saturday evening.

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This follows Australian public broadcaster SBS’s decision last week to suspend NTV Moscow and RT from airing their bulletins on its channels.

RT will no longer be accessible on YouTube in Ukraine either, following a governmental request to suspend broadcasting of RT and several other channels in the beleaguered nation. Deadline previously reported YouTube’s confirmation it is cutting add ad revenue in all regions for RT and “several other channels affiliated with recent sanctions.”

RT continues to air in the UK, although the media regulator Ofcom is monitoring the channel for any breaches of the broadcasting code. The UK’s opposition Labour Party has called for a complete ban on the channel, which it accuses of being a “Russian propaganda tool.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has ordered a review of the channel’s UK license, although he stressed in Parliament this week that it should be up to the regulator and not politicians to make the decision on whether or not RT should be allowed to continue to air.

“We live in a democracy, and we live in a country that believes in free speech,” said Johnson.

“I think it’s important we leave it up to Ofcom, rather than politicians, to decide which media organizations to ban.

“That’s what Russia does.”

Sure enough, Western reporters in Moscow have reported an increased tightening on news reports across Russian media, meaning its citizens are given only a Kremlin-approved perspective on the invasion of Ukraine.

The Guardian reports that the Russian government has throttled Facebook and threatened to close independent media outlets such as TV Rain and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which published an edition in Russian and Ukrainian this week with the headline “Russia is bombing Ukraine”.

It reports that media have been instructed to use only official government sources for reports and that certain words have also been banned from use in headlines and stories covering the conflict. Meduza, a Russian news website based in Latvia, has published a list of banned words: “Attack”, “invasion”, “war”.

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