All of our anchors begin their shows with 'Hello from Moscow.'
— Margarita Simonyan
When we were a quiet, little-noticed channel telling stories from Russia, our audience was negligible. When we started being really provocative... our audience started to grow.
We would like to be the third-most-watched news channel in the U.K.
When you read Western press, you probably get a feeling that all Russian press is censored, there's no freedom at all, we can't say whatever, which is absolutely, absolutely, completely untrue.
Somehow it did not occur to us that, in a developed democracy, regular media advertising could turn out to be a suspicious and harmful activity.
The American Justice Department has left us with no choice. Our lawyers say that if we don't register as a foreign agent, the director of our company in America could be arrested, and the accounts of the company could be seized.
RT was one of the first channels to cover the Wikileaks story and to interview Julian Assange a long time ago, way before it made headlines around the globe.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the television businesses found it was easier to hire 16- or 18-year-olds and teach them everything from the beginning rather than re-teach the old-school folk.
There is not a single international foreign TV channel that is doing something other than promotion of the values of the country that it is broadcasting from.
If you look at any station, you will see that what people are reporting comes from what they believe in, where they stand, their background, what their countries believe in.
One might have thought that Brexit would be a wake-up call for the American media. Yet, just as in the U.K. referendum, 'Russia' became the buzzword in the U.S. election that the political and media establishments thought would scare people into voting for the status quo.
I don't like wars. Any wars.
The disgusting truth is that some of the less-educated families in the Caucasus hate and despise Russians simply because they are Russian, just as some less-educated Russian families feel the same way about people from the Caucasus.
Russian children typically hear racist and ethnic slurs against Caucasus natives at home before hearing it on the streets.
We congratulate American freedom of speech and all who still believe in it.
In the U.S., the country that has always been lecturing the world about the value of freedoms - of freedom of speech, of everyone's right to speak up - the U.S. has now become a beacon, a leader, in this movement to shut everyone up. That's so disappointing.
All of the people who work in the Russian government and Russian presidential administration, in this way or another, work for Vladimir Putin.
We removed 'Russia Today' from the logo after many colleagues, also from foreign media, told us that it was diminishing our potential audience.
Mainstream media journalists, especially in the United States and West Europe, prefer to ignore those problems in their own countries which they usually criticize in other countries, including in Russia.
There is state-run television in Russia, which is more loyal to the state, as it always is with state television in any country. We have private owned networks; some of them are oppositional. We have thousands of regional networks that, in their regions, are more watched than the so-called federal stations.
American TV news is much more sophisticated. I think that American TV networks, it looks like, they invest a lot into news.
Twitter has revealed some monstrous information in Congress: we spent money on our ad campaigns. Just as all the usual media organizations in the world do.
To all the self-righteous defenders of 'freedom of speech' who oh-so-ardently proclaimed that FARA registration places no restrictions whatsoever on RT's journalistic work in the U.S.: Withdrawal of Congressional credentials speaks much louder than empty platitudes.
Not a single story on 'BBC World News' is any different from the British foreign policy.
There's a huge generational gap between the Soviet-school journalists and the new journalists. We were not brought up working on propaganda; we were brought up in the new Russia, working on the news.
Believe me, most of the people in Russia are seeing the West as a threat.
It is high time Western establishments stopped blaming Russia for all their problems.
The information weapon, of course, is used in critical moments, and war is always a critical moment.
We do have our mistakes sometimes, like 'The New York Times' does, like everything does. We correct them.
The root cause of xenophobia in Russia is not religious differences between Muslims and Christians. Nor is it crime. The root cause is the terrible education that children acquire on the street, at school, and at home.
What's obvious is that the U.S. has a very imperfect system, and yet its leaders are obsessed with lecturing the rest of the world on how to organise their affairs.
When the world normalizes, everything is going to be fine with RT. When the U.S. and Russia get along again - and I don't see any deep reasons why we shouldn't get along... we are going to work normally like a normal news organization.
If I saw and if I really sincerely thought that what Putin is doing is harmful for my country and for my people and it needs to be stopped, I wouldn't hesitate to do that.
All of the mainstream French media - all of them - were jumping out of their pants to make people vote for Macron - all of them.
Our job is to tell the world about Russia and to report world news from a Russian viewpoint.
Not too many people out there are interested in Russia so much that they really want to watch things about Russia and only about Russia.
Being government funded does not necessarily mean being biased, just like being privately funded does not necessarily mean being independent.
Media outlets do not exist in a vacuum.
The U.S. has made a lot of mistakes all over the world... look at Iraq. The country that makes such mistakes do not have the moral right to teach the world.
When Russia is at war, we are, of course, on Russia's side.
Russia has never been very good at explaining itself to foreigners.
We want to develop into a really trusted name that people turn to because they want to know what's going on in the country.
If we do have people appearing on the air live that are later found out to be Holocaust deniers or anything like that, we immediately put them onto a list of people who are forbidden from the air.
It's time to wake up to the reality that ignoring the genuine concerns of the 'fringe,' until it becomes the majority, is patently ridiculous. That the scapegoating of alternative opinions doesn't work.
It's impossible to start making a weapon only when the war already started!
I have two children, and I'm very, very peaceful.
Immigrants are not the real problem. The real problem is much more serious: intolerance and hatred of indigenous ethnic groups. You can prohibit immigration, but what can you do about non-Russian ethnic groups living in their native territories in Russia?
Apparently, all foreign media organisations have to follow an approved script of acceptable coverage, lest they are accused of interference. And make no mistake: we're not talking about neutrality. The only acceptable approach was, 'Support Clinton, attack Trump'.
I'm so tired of this argument that all we ever do is under Kremlin orders and so and so forth. Tell me, how is it possible? I am not on the air. If you watch RT, you will see that all of our shows are hosted by people to whom it would be impossible to tell them anything.
We never make editorial decisions with people who are working closely with Vladimir Putin, unless you consider myself a person who is working closely with Vladimir Putin.
