WaPo - RT wants to spread Moscows propaganda here. Lets treat it that way.

I am sure Trump will oppose this even though RT is directly controlled by the Kremlin, rather than having any independence from the Russian Government.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/20/rt-wants-to-spread-moscows-propaganda-here-lets-treat-it-that-way/?utm_term=.bfc5bfee65e1

Last week, the Russian government-funded cable network RT announced that its American arm had been asked by the Justice Department to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Formerly known as Russia Today, RT was singled out this year in an intelligence community report on Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest,” the report concluded.

Originally passed in 1938 to address the scourge of Nazi propaganda, FARA requires any individual or entity acting “at the order, request, or under direction or control, of a foreign principal” to register with the Justice Department. The agent must then periodically disclose the nature of its financial arrangements with the foreign principal and provide detailed, regular reports about the distribution of “informational materials” on its behalf. FARA does not in any way circumscribe what foreign agents may say or publish; the law merely requires that the information they disseminate be clearly labeled as originating from a foreign government.

The first entity convicted of failing to comply with FARA was a news service operated by the Nazi regime, and the law has remained relevant ever since. The New York bureau of the Soviet news agency TASS registered from the 1940s onward, as did a variety of other Soviet media outlets including Pravda and Izvestiya. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was recently made to retroactively register as a foreign agent on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party after failing to do so from 2012 to 2014. Applying FARA to RT (and possibly Sputnik, a Kremlin-funded Internet “news” service also being investigated by the FBI) is long overdue.

Registering RT as a foreign agent will not hinder the network’s ability to broadcast. What it will do is provide transparency for American citizens. FARA basically applies lobbying disclosure measures to the activities of foreign governments: Just as Americans have a right to know how corporations attempt to affect legislation, they should also be informed of the ways in which other countries try to influence our political process. According to a report recently published by the Atlantic Council, making RT (which expressly changed its name to disguise its Russian origins) identify itself as the instrument of a foreign government “does not suppress freedom of speech; instead, it serves the First Amendment by supplementing information available to the public.” Nor does it imply any sort of governmental discrimination as to the value of different types of speech or infringe upon the sacred First Amendment rights of American citizens. Only when the tinfoil hat-wearing man ranting on the street corner about the water fluoridation government mind control experiment is paid by the Russian government to shout these things on RT should he have to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent.