3d ago

Ground.news and RT.com

If there is a better community for me to post this in please let me know prior to deleting this post.

Do any of you use Ground.news? It's pretty great at finding multiple sources of information on the same topic and helping to compare biases. Sometime in the not-too-distant past they stopped including articles from RT.com. I'm not really sure why. I found it really helpful when people would post from the Russian government news agency and show them other sides of the story, or when they actually posted decent stuff, share it from something that isn't so often crap.

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There are plenty of other international outlets on there to give other perspectives, RT doesn’t give perspectives though, they give intentionally incorrect information to create confusion, not even to push a specific line, just to muddy the waters as much as possible. It subtracts from context, doesn’t add to it.

@fu RT is literally state propaganda of Russia. With lots of fake news and half coverage about anything. If you'd ask me to choose 2 news sources to get rid of from the face of the planet, they would be RT and Sputnik. They're not just propaganda about Russia (which is what TASS and other state media agencies are), they're simply Russian propaganda about anything.
- @petrescatraian OK sure, but that doesn't address the issue of Ground.news not wanting to include it. Maybe theRussian government asked them to?
  
  The Russian regime would be more than happy to have their propaganda outlets branded "news". But it's not. And since it's not a source of news, there's no reason for Ground News to include it.
  Besides which, RT has been sanctioned in the response to the Russian full scale invasion of Ukraine. This makes it difficult to maintain a business relationship, which linking might very well be.

RT is a mouthpiece of the Russian government; the only "other side of the story" that would come from it would not only be misleading, but also promote the authoritarianism, war crimes, and aggression of the Russian government.
In an age when LLMs make reading the truth harder and harder, blacklisting publications that are guaranteed propaganda is essential.
In the same vein, even though I'm fully supportive of Ukraine and its right to self-defense, I don't think people should use any of the equivalent American propaganda agencies (U.S. Agency for Global Media: Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and Office of Cuba Broadcasting), since their reporting is often deliberately biased in favor of American foreign policy interests. Furthermore, there's plenty of Western media sources not backed by state interests, so they're never the only source on something anyhow.
The only reliable public broadcasting organizations are those with independent operations financed via public contributions, such as the BBC.
Private broadcasting organizations often have bias as well, with tabloids and extremist sources such as Newsmax being just as unreliable and misleading as state-backed outlets, so vigilance in maintaining a line in the sand between journalism and propaganda is essential.
- The BBC is state apparatus. It was founded by the Government and exists at the governments pleasure. It is to Britain and America what RT is to Russia only more sophisticated, using techniques such as funnelling for many many years .
  The “plenty of Western media not own by the state” is owned by the billionaire class and further the agenda of the elites - so not only are you getting western bias, but you’re getting class division thrown in.
  In 2025, the only way to discern any truth at all is to read what was actually said, a transcript of speech for example .
  If you did that, you would understand that 90% of what is attributed to Russia or Putin, was never said at all.
  
  Aside from the organization's charter mandating editorial independence, the BBC being publicly-funded by the country's annual broadcasting fee ensures that it does not need to pander to politicians to conduct its operations. It's far more effective at this than PBS, which is more likely to be biased due to its need for corporate and charitable sponsors.
  RT in contrast is only accountable to the Russian government, and ultimately Putin, and is thus unable to maintain editorial independence from the government's national and foreign policy interests.

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