We removed 'Russia Today' from the logo after many colleagues, also from foreign media, told us that it was diminishing our potential audience.
Margarita Simonyan
I'm so tired of this argument that all we ever do is under Kremlin orders and so and so forth. Tell me, how is it possible? I am not on the air. If you watch RT, you will see that all of our shows are hosted by people to whom it would be impossible to tell them anything.
Russia has never been very good at explaining itself to foreigners.
I noticed that mainstream western TV channels, especially CNN and ABC, show the same thing.
RT was one of the first channels to cover the Wikileaks story and to interview Julian Assange a long time ago, way before it made headlines around the globe.
When you read Western press, you probably get a feeling that all Russian press is censored, there's no freedom at all, we can't say whatever, which is absolutely, absolutely, completely untrue.
It's time to wake up to the reality that ignoring the genuine concerns of the 'fringe,' until it becomes the majority, is patently ridiculous. That the scapegoating of alternative opinions doesn't work.
When the world normalizes, everything is going to be fine with RT. When the U.S. and Russia get along again - and I don't see any deep reasons why we shouldn't get along... we are going to work normally like a normal news organization.
Russian children typically hear racist and ethnic slurs against Caucasus natives at home before hearing it on the streets.
What's obvious is that the U.S. has a very imperfect system, and yet its leaders are obsessed with lecturing the rest of the world on how to organise their affairs.
I lived in America. I love America.
I don't understand why any country is given a chance to make its point of view seen and heard by the world, and Russia is not given that chance.
If all the media are singing one song, it gets dangerous; it really does.
You might not believe me, but I really don't like conspiracy theories.
It worries me that western journalists, especially British ones, call everyone they don't like 'marginal.'
When the USSR collapsed, I was 11, and unlike many people, I don't miss it.
There is just a small difference between the United States and Russia - Russia does not teach the whole world democracy.
British media supported Hillary. No problem with that. No interference. Nothing. French media supported Hillary. No problem with that. Some Russian media supported Trump: 'Oh my God!'
RT did not support Trump.
I'm a journalist. I've been a journalist ever since I was 18.
America had Russia wrapped around it little pinky through the whole '90s. We did everything you told us. And we were eager to do more and more. The whole nation - Russian nation was like, 'Tell us what else we can do to please you. We want to be like you. We love you.' And then in 1999, bam. You bomb Yugoslavia. And that was the end of it.
All of the mainstream French media - all of them - were jumping out of their pants to make people vote for Macron - all of them.
All of the people who work in the Russian government and Russian presidential administration, in this way or another, work for Vladimir Putin.
We never make editorial decisions with people who are working closely with Vladimir Putin, unless you consider myself a person who is working closely with Vladimir Putin.
If I saw and if I really sincerely thought that what Putin is doing is harmful for my country and for my people and it needs to be stopped, I wouldn't hesitate to do that.
In the U.S., the country that has always been lecturing the world about the value of freedoms - of freedom of speech, of everyone's right to speak up - the U.S. has now become a beacon, a leader, in this movement to shut everyone up. That's so disappointing.
We congratulate American freedom of speech and all who still believe in it.
Apparently, all foreign media organisations have to follow an approved script of acceptable coverage, lest they are accused of interference. And make no mistake: we're not talking about neutrality. The only acceptable approach was, 'Support Clinton, attack Trump'.
Immigrants are not the real problem. The real problem is much more serious: intolerance and hatred of indigenous ethnic groups. You can prohibit immigration, but what can you do about non-Russian ethnic groups living in their native territories in Russia?
The root cause of xenophobia in Russia is not religious differences between Muslims and Christians. Nor is it crime. The root cause is the terrible education that children acquire on the street, at school, and at home.
The disgusting truth is that some of the less-educated families in the Caucasus hate and despise Russians simply because they are Russian, just as some less-educated Russian families feel the same way about people from the Caucasus.
I have two children, and I'm very, very peaceful.
We do have our mistakes sometimes, like 'The New York Times' does, like everything does. We correct them.
I don't like wars. Any wars.
It's impossible to start making a weapon only when the war already started!
The information weapon, of course, is used in critical moments, and war is always a critical moment.
One might have thought that Brexit would be a wake-up call for the American media. Yet, just as in the U.K. referendum, 'Russia' became the buzzword in the U.S. election that the political and media establishments thought would scare people into voting for the status quo.
It is high time Western establishments stopped blaming Russia for all their problems.
If you look at any station, you will see that what people are reporting comes from what they believe in, where they stand, their background, what their countries believe in.
If we do have people appearing on the air live that are later found out to be Holocaust deniers or anything like that, we immediately put them onto a list of people who are forbidden from the air.
Believe me, most of the people in Russia are seeing the West as a threat.
There is not a single international foreign TV channel that is doing something other than promotion of the values of the country that it is broadcasting from.
We want to develop into a really trusted name that people turn to because they want to know what's going on in the country.
There's a huge generational gap between the Soviet-school journalists and the new journalists. We were not brought up working on propaganda; we were brought up in the new Russia, working on the news.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the television businesses found it was easier to hire 16- or 18-year-olds and teach them everything from the beginning rather than re-teach the old-school folk.
Not a single story on 'BBC World News' is any different from the British foreign policy.
When Russia is at war, we are, of course, on Russia's side.
To all the self-righteous defenders of 'freedom of speech' who oh-so-ardently proclaimed that FARA registration places no restrictions whatsoever on RT's journalistic work in the U.S.: Withdrawal of Congressional credentials speaks much louder than empty platitudes.
The American Justice Department has left us with no choice. Our lawyers say that if we don't register as a foreign agent, the director of our company in America could be arrested, and the accounts of the company could be seized.
The U.S. has made a lot of mistakes all over the world... look at Iraq. The country that makes such mistakes do not have the moral right to teach the world.
