The Foxtel Group has banished the RT (aka Russia Today) channel from its platforms. The announcement came via a short statement on social media on Saturday afternoon:
In view of concern about the situation in Ukraine, the Russia Today channel is currently unavailable on Foxtel and Flash News.
The subscription TV platform reacted quickly to the way the channel run by the Russian Government was covering events in Ukraine following the invasion last week. It had been accused by many of being a tool in the propaganda war against Ukraine.
Not many Foxtel subscribers probably knew much about the channel or watched it.
The channel had a higher profile on the new Flash News streaming offering and it made sense to quickly drop the service as war raged in Europe over the past few days.
The conflict over Ukraine makes the Flash subscription a consideration for many who want to track the fight over the country. But having the biased coverage coming from the Russian-controlled news channel is not something that enhanced the independence of the various voices.
Flash has been using the war to highlight what it does best – collect coverage of breaking news wherever it happens.
The 25 news channels available to Flash subscribers all have coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with Flash noting that a number of channels – including CNN (pictured above), Al Jazeera, France 24, Fox News, BBC World News and Sky News UK – have reporters on the ground in Ukraine and neighbouring countries.
Bloomberg reported overnight the European Union’s executive is banning state-owned Russian media companies Sputnik and RT, saying they’re propaganda tools in the war over Ukraine.
Audience numbers for RT on broadcast platforms, including Foxtel, are small. When the UK audience data was being collected in 2017 it was getting just 3,400 viewers at any given point, according to Ofcom, Britain’s independent media regulator.
Where RT does have a bigger is audience is going direct to its audience with 4.6 million subscribers on YouTube and 7.4 million followers on Facebook.
Meanwhile British Prime Minister Boris Johnson overnight criticised news channel RT for “peddling” material that is “doing a lot of damage to the truth” and called for Ofcom to look at if it is “infringing the rules of this country”, reported the Evening Standard.
RT has reported on the recent bands, adding: RT has previously faced censorship in Europe, with German regulators banning its German-language channel earlier this month. More recently, Google subsidiary YouTube and Facebook parent company Meta demonetized RT’s accounts on Saturday, while Google blocked downloads of RT’s app on Ukrainian territory earlier on Sunday.
