UK watchdog revokes Russia Today’s broadcast licence

Russia Today has been stripped of its licence to broadcast in the UK after an investigation by the media regulator concluded that the Russian state-backed television network was not a “responsible broadcaster”.

Ofcom said on Friday that it no longer considered RT’s licence holder, ANO TV Novosti, to be “fit and proper” after launching 29 investigations into impartiality breaches regarding the broadcaster’s news and current affairs coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We consider the volume and potentially serious nature of the issues raised within such a short period to be of great concern — especially given RT’s compliance history, which has seen the channel fined £200,000 for previous due impartiality breaches,” the watchdog said.

Ofcom’s move is the latest in an escalating information war between western allies of Ukraine and Russia, which has restricted access to several foreign news sites and passed legislation that bans “fake news” and forbids insulting official institutions online.

The push to ban RT gathered pace last month when Nadine Dorries, culture secretary, asked Ofcom to look at the operation of the network in the UK over concerns that it could “look to spread harmful disinformation” about the war in Ukraine.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has also called for a ban, calling Russia Today the “personal propaganda tool” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, told reporters Ofcom’s decision was “continuing the anti-Russian madness that is happening in America and Europe”.

Ofcom on Friday said its investigation had also taken into account “RT’s relationship with the Russian Federation” and recognised that “RT is funded by the Russian state, which has recently invaded a neighbouring sovereign country”.

RT was pulled off air in the UK earlier this month because of sanctions. YouTube and Meta, the owner of Facebook, have also blocked the network from broadcasting to Europeans on its platforms, cutting one of its main routes of access to the western public.

Anna Belinka, RT’s deputy editor-in-chief, said Ofcom was “ignoring RT’s completely clean record of four consecutive years”, dismissing the fine it was handed in 2019 after the regulator found it had aired impartial reporting on the Salisbury poisonings, the war in Syria and the Ukrainian government’s treatment of Roma people.

“Ofcom has falsely judged RT to not be ‘fit and proper’ and in doing so robbed the UK public of access to information,” Belinka said, arguing that Ofcom was “stating purely political reasons tied directly to the situation in Ukraine and yet completely unassociated to RT’s operations, structure, management or editorial output”.

James Heappey, UK defence minister, told the BBC the decision was “welcome” adding that it was right that it had been taken by the regulator, not the government.

Heappey said: “RT is a channel for Russian propaganda. It makes no effort to not show bias, in fact it makes every effort to lie.”

Chris Bryant, a Labour MP, said he was “delighted” at the move. “Putin’s propagandists should go home and those who took RT cash should give it to Ukrainian reconstruction.”

Additional reporting by Jim Pickard and George Parker