Russia Today channel takes to the air

The new Russia Today channel began broadcasting today. It is Russia's first 24-hour English-language news channel.

According to a RIA Novosti article:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Saturday that Russia Today, the country's first 24-hour English-language news channel, that hit the airwaves at 1 p.m. GMT, would be a success overseas.

"I do believe that giving the huge interest to everything related to Russia, be it culture, history, modern days developments, the information demand for Russian news, for Russian views of the world affairs, and of coverage of what is going on in Russia is going to be huge," Lavrov said in an interview with the channel.

"And I think that the initiative to create this channel is a welcome one and will certainly get a lot of viewers around the globe," the minister said.

Margarita Simonyan, the 26-year-old chief editor of Russia Today, said Friday: "We have several satellites, and we will broadcast to the United States and Canada via IA-5 and to Europe via Hotbird-6."

The fact it is broadcasting about Russia in English to the United States is not by accident.

An article in Foreign Policy by Julian Evans says the channel is an effort to improve Russia's image in the West.

It’s no secret that Moscow has an image problem. When Russian President Vladimir Putin makes headlines, it’s usually for jailing a businessman or cracking down on dissent. A 2003 poll commissioned by Putin’s government revealed the depth of the problem. The survey asked Americans to name the top 10 things they associated with Russia. The top four were communism, the KGB, snow, and the mafia. The sole positive association—Russian art and culture—came in dead last. A poll conducted in August on foreigners’ awareness of Russian brands did even worse. The only "brands" foreigners could think of were Kalashnikov rifles and Molotov cocktails.
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Whether the Western media bias is real or not, the Russian government certainly thinks it is, and it has launched a PR campaign to improve its image in the eyes of the world. Why does this response come now, at a time when Russia needs the West less than at any time in the past 20 years? One can only assume that the campaign is in preparation for the G-8 summit in Russia next year, when, in McFaul’s words, "7,000 foreign journalists will descend on St. Petersburg looking for something to write about." Although oil-rich Russia may not need the West’s financial assistance anymore, Putin and his team still have an overriding desire to see Russia accepted at the top table of global affairs.