Will Russia Today succeed?

Now it is pretty pointless to speculate what will Russia Today do, we will talk about it when we will see it. Hopefully, they will have a good site to check their stories. With this in mind, Mr.Evans can be right, stories about Buddhist medicine, the Old Believers, and Myskina do not look promising.

The reason for this is that Buddhist medicine and Old Believers are interesting, but that's not really news. As for Myskina - with all due respect for sports in general and her looks in particular, it is typical infotainment, plague of US/UK media.

Mr.Evans is also right in his humility. Showing the region to outsiders in all its beauty and ugliness is very difficult, "oppressed geniuses" and sycophants do not make it any easier. As for personal safety and general comfort - yes, this is a critical issue. What really matters is quality coverage, not sadomasochism aka martyrdom.
Where Mr.Evans is 100% wrong is in his assessment of the role of local hot stories. Take Aljazeera. They certainly carry lots of local hot stories - mostly about terrorism. However, comparing their news flow with that from the Western media, we find huge overlap. In fact, almost all stories from Aljazeera have their Western counterparts.

When it comes to local corruption which is most certainly flourishing, Aljazeera does not seem to be more open than BBC or NYT. Actually, it makes sense, their mission is not uncovering certain well hidden mysteries of the ME!

Where Aljazeera is second to none is balanced story selection and story telling. They also carry excellent analysis and wonderful cartoons. This is their way to fight the anti-Arab propaganda machine - by superior quality, not by blame games. It is also critical that Aljazeera's coverage of the West is often better than Western! Even on Israel, Arabs' sworn enemy, Aljazeera manages to provide good although scarce coverage. Well, nobody reasonable will get news on Israeli politics from Aljazeera,- or news on the Arab world from Jpost or MEMRI. In fact, Aljazeera was created in direct response to MEMRI and other propaganda factories.

IMHO, RT does not seem seem to have any other model of success than post-Soviet Aljazeera. No, mere image polishing is not going to work.

1. JULIAN EVANS. Smile For The Cameras
The impression I get from the programmes I have watched, which to be fair to Russia Today were just rehearsal programmes, was that the channel would dutifully pick up any Kremlin-critical stories that were already in general circulation. In that sense, it would be independent. However, its original stories on Russia - which are the only reason to watch the channel - are likely to be bland in the extreme. The three original documentaries I saw were on Buddhist medicine, the Old Believer religious sect, and Anastasia Myskina. Not exactly the stuff to get one s pulse racing.
It s a pity, because as Simonian says, western interest in Russia is waning, and I for one would enjoy an English-language channel on Russia which had some genuinely interesting and original stories on it. There s so much that goes unreported, so many violent, ugly, dark, but also beautiful, hopeful and brave stories. But you have to fight for those stories, fight against authorities and companies who don t want to let the stories out. The best journalism - and I m by no means saying I produce it - requires that sort of grit, fight and real courage. It s not produced by people like me, sitting in Moscow, who know they can flee to London if things got nasty. It is written by unknown journalists in the regions, who risk their lives to uncover local gangsters and regional corruption, and then occasionally end up shot dead, and get maybe two inches in the Moscow Times as their reward.

2. Arab cartoons blog

Katrina was a good example hows easy it would be for villains to take over.

One more Exploitation!