RT News Russia

RT (TV network), previously known as Russia Today, is a publicly funded, multilingual television news network based in Russia. RT shows round the clock news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows, and debates, as well as sports news and cultural programs on Russia. The service is aimed at the overseas market, similar to other international news channels, and broadcast through satellite and cable operators throughout the world.

In addition to the flagship English-language broadcast, it also runs Arabic and Spanish language channels, and RT America, which is oriented to viewers in the United States. It broadcasts from its headquarters in Moscow and its studio in Washington, DC, and also has bureaus in Miami, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Delhi and Tel Aviv.

RT is the second most-watched foreign news channel in the United States, after the BBC. By March 2010, its videos had garnered more than 83 million views on YouTube. It has 2,000 employees worldwide.

RT started broadcasting on December 10, 2005 with nearly 100 English-speaking journalists reporting for it worldwide. It was the first all-digital Russian TV network, and cost about $30 million in 2005 to set up and $60 million for its first year of operation, Margarita Simonyan, RT's editor-in-chief, says the station was born out of the desire to present an "unbiased portrait of Russia."

The network was launched by the autonomous non-profit organization ANO TV-Novosti in 2005, but much of the funding to this organization is injected from the Russian Federal Budget (2.4 billion rubles in 2007). This is equivalent to 82.56 million August 8, 2011 U.S. dollars.

In August 2007, RT had television's first ever live report from the North Pole, which lasted 5 minutes, 41 seconds. An RT crew participated in the Arktika 2007 Russian polar expedition, led by Artur Chilingarov on the Akademik Fyodorov icebreaker.   From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia