“The Russian military intervention has crossed a line for me,” said Stéphanie de Muru, the French presenter of RT (Russia Today) France. “I’ve always said that if one day something bothered me, I would jump to my conclusions. I draw those conclusions today.’
For more than four years, the well-known 49-year-old Stéphanie de Muru played ‘the Russian voice’ on French television. Before that, De Muru had been on television for almost fifteen years. She started promisingly and in 2008 was awarded the prize for ‘best young journalist’. De Muru presented numerous news programs on the commercial news channel BFM TV (towards ten million viewers a day) and thus became a familiar and appreciated face on French television.
It was therefore a smart move by RT to tie De Muru to it: in this way the skeptical launch of the channel could be softened slightly. All the more so because De Muru came from a politically unsuspecting corner from BFM TV. That station, critics said, had actually helped Macron – who would become the headliner on RT France – to his presidency by giving him so much airtime.
With a budget of about 300 million euros per year, sponsored by the Russian government, RT managed to gain a foothold in many Western countries in recent years: in Spain (2009), the United States (2011), Germany (2014) and France (2017) it got a news channel. The channel is also active online: De Muru once proudly reported that RT France generated more than 14 million views in one month.
timing
That is now coming to an end. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Sunday that media organizations affiliated with the Kremlin will be banned from today (on both television and the internet). That makes the timing of De Muru’s departure remarkable, skeptics will note. Her colleague Frédéric Taddeï already announced on February 22 that he would stop his talk show — even before the Russian invasion, ‘out of loyalty to France’.
When De Muru joined RT France in 2017, there was a lot of criticism. In her own words, she was simply ready for something new. “It’s in my personality to take risks,” she told Le Parisien† She called it “magical” to be involved in the birth of a new station. The mother of two sons had no need for ‘integrity lessons’. A conversation with the ‘brilliant’ director Xenia Fedorova had allayed the concerns that ‘she also had initially’.
‘This is not a Russian propaganda channel,’ said De Muru, ‘but a channel that offers an alternative to the current media. There is a need for that in France.’ She stated that there are ‘always two perspectives’. Until the end, she maintained that she enjoyed complete journalistic freedom at RT.
Former employees of Western branches of RT paint a different picture. Ultimately, the channel always presents the Russian perspective, or trivializes sound criticism of it elsewhere. That happens in a subtle way. At first glance, RT seems to be a kind of equivalent of the BBC in terms of programming, decor and set-up. And friend and foe agree: it’s not RT’s tactic to be tough fake news spreading.
‘Undermine the EU’
A former RT Europe reporter described it to de Volkskrant as follows: ‘Today you defend the party of the Greek Prime Minister Tsipras, tomorrow you criticize the same kind of party in another country. It doesn’t matter if someone is left or right. The approach is always: undermine the EU and defend the interests of the Kremlin.’
RT France continuously showed the demonstrations of the Yellow Vests. No wonder that the channel was immensely popular with the Yellow Vests. That went so far that Yellow Vest protesters sometimes chanted the name of RT. In the studio, invited guests then expressed their appreciation for the protest movement.
During one of the demonstrations, RT broadcast how a woman said Macron must leave “because he only thinks about his own comfort and that of his wife Brigitte”. They would rather see Brigitte Macron ‘naked on a stack of pallets’. De Muru responded to the outrage that the fragment had only been broadcast once.
The channel also once announced revelations about Macron, which would be forthcoming on whistleblower site WikiLeaks. Only: they never came.
Unfair
The French media watchdog CSA tipped RT on the fingers because of a report about the war in Syria. RT had disputed whether chemical weapons attacks in the eastern region of Ghouta had actually taken place. CSA concluded that the reporting was ‘unfair’ and that witness statements from Syrian bystanders had been mistranslated. RT stated that it had indeed gone wrong, but that this was purely ‘technical error’. RT was not sanctioned.
The Muru has always dismissed Russian state interference with RT as nonsense. In an interview with Le Figaro In early 2019 she said: ‘Are we asking journalists from France 24 whether they are the mouthpiece of Emmanuel Macron, or BBC journalists that of Theresa May? It does not make any sense.’
Tuesday she was more realistic. Trust has been broken, she admitted. ‘In that context, it is extremely difficult to carry out your duties as a journalist, if you work for a channel that is affiliated with Russia.’ It took a war and a ban on RT to come to that realization.