ON MARCH 5, 2014, ANCHOR LIZ WAHL was on air at the RT America studio in Washington, DC, presenting the news. Suddenly, she ignored the prewritten script running on the teleprompter. “I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin,” Wahl told her viewers. “I’m proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth. And that is why, after this newscast, I’m resigning.”1
As she walked away from the anchor desk, the Russian director called Wahl into his office and demanded an explanation. She repeated what she had just said on air, then left the RT newsroom for the final time.
Wahl’s on-air resignation became worldwide breaking news. “As I walked out of the station, my phone started to blow up. The news literally spread around the world so quickly. I never could have imagined that,” Wahl shares.
The traditional media bombarded her with so many interview requests that she didn’t have time to answer them all. For several days, Wahl appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and other media outlets, recounting her experience working for RT. Later, she testified about Russian information warfare before the US Congress.
RT’s management didn’t bother to address Wahl’s criticism. Instead, it questioned her mental health, tangled her in odd conspiracies, and influenced a network of influential pro-Kremlin YouTubers and internet trolls to go on the attack.
Liz Wahl is an experienced journalist and a talented television professional. She was born to a military family at the US naval base at Subic Bay, in the western part of the Philippines, close to the capital of Manila. Her grandparents had experienced firsthand the Soviet Union’s aggression. In 1956, they sought refuge in the United States after citizens in their home country of Hungary were attacked by Soviet-backed security forces for resisting the communist regime.
At the time of her resignation, Wahl had worked at RT for two and a half years. While there, she had witnessed how the Russian news directors at the network’s Washington bureau continually and unethically interfered with the editorial process. In particular, as Russia’s military operations in Ukraine intensified, the network’s higher-ups made Wahl and her colleagues’ attempts to produce fact-based journalism impossible.
Shortly before Wahl resigned, a report she had done on Ukraine had been sabotaged. She had recorded an interview with a US congressman, asking for his views on the Russian soldiers invading Ukraine, after it had become apparent they had entered the Crimean Peninsula illegally. But the final, aired story did not include Wahl’s interview, as the Russian news directors had asked the editors to cut it. According to the general narrative disseminated by the Kremlin and broadcast on RT, no Russian military operations were taking place in Ukraine. “Before the war in Ukraine, it was never quite like that. You were allowed to ask questions from the interviewees. But at this point, you weren’t allowed to do that. With RT, you had to denigrate and downplay Ukraine,” Wahl explains.
The RT supervisors also urged Wahl to report about Ukraine’s “new neo-Nazi government,” although no such government existed. The channel also pushed conspiracy theories stating that the United States, European Union, and the CIA had meddled and interfered in Ukraine.
Wahl considered her employer’s reporting disturbing and unethical. She was especially troubled by how openly RT blackened her own homeland, underscoring the flaws of American society.
Originally it was RT who approached Wahl to work as a journalist in its Washington office.
In 2011, Wahl was employed at a small news station in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US dependency in the Pacific Ocean. RT’s news director had seen a report Wahl had done about the nuclear power plant disaster in Fukushima and wanted to recruit her. The channel had recently rebranded itself, abandoning its original name, Russia Today, and started marketing itself as a legitimate news outlet. Only several years later would the full scope of RT’s mission as the Kremlin’s international “information weapon” be analyzed in-depth in the West.2
During her employment negotiations, RT was sold to Wahl as an “international news station focusing on stories that the mainstream media ignores.” The news director equated RT America with Al Jazeera English, the network that covered the Arabic world. Wahl had her doubts. She asked about the journalistic independence of RT. “The bosses answered that the idea of RT’s lack of journalistic independence was a ‘Cold War mentality’ and laughed,” she says. “They said that such ideas were part of the image of Russia that they were trying to get away from. And that’s why they had the international channel.”
But the network’s de facto mission was revealed by its Russian editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan. In a 2012 interview that discussed, among other topics, Russia’s information war with the West, Simonyan stated that, “when Russia is at war, we are, of course, on the side of Russia.”3
While weighing the job offer, Wahl checked the content produced by RT. In 2011 it wasn’t yet a 24/7 propaganda factory. “RT did cover stories that were 100 percent truthful and legitimate—but those stories would always focus on problems in Europe and in the US, and never in Russia,” Wahl says.
Despite her misgivings, she accepted the offer.
At first, the processes at RT seemed no different than those at other news outlets. Wahl conducted interviews, produced news packages, and presented live newscasts. She would gather information, sometimes travel to cover stories, make video reports and book studio guests and interviewees for future shows. The working routines at the channel seemed familiar.
But the choices of news topics, viewpoints and the interview subjects were under the strict control of the Russian directors. “On the surface, it seemed like you had a lot of freedom,” says Wahl. “But along the way, you learned that you only had freedom when you criticized the US, the West, or the European Union. When the story was about Russia or Russia’s allies, it was not so free.”
The directors were pleased whenever Wahl pitched story ideas about troubles in the United States. Protests against the US government were always a hot topic. However, the stories were often taken out of their original context and blown out of proportion.
In the beginning of Wahl’s RT journey, one special area of interest for the network was the Occupy Wall Street movement. The citizen initiative against financial inequality and in support of human rights launched a series of street rallies worldwide. In the United States, people gathered in Manhattan’s Wall Street area, demanding that the power of the banks be reduced and that other societal problems be addressed.
The movement was an important and legitimate news topic that required media coverage. However, RT’s coverage was magnified and slanted. Wahl saw how the network used people’s worries about the US government’s handling of the 2008 financial crisis and its decision to bail out the banks to prove that the whole of American democracy was in ruins. RT reporters were enthusiastically sent to film police officers patrolling the streets in full combat gear. “The Occupy Wall Street coverage was obsessive,” Wahl recalls. The channel employed multiple reporters to live-report the protest in cities throughout the United States.
With its disproportionate coverage, the network wanted to create the impression that the mainstream media wasn’t genuinely interested in the protesters’ frustrations, and that RT was the only media source people could rely on. “RT doesn’t have to invent the problems, because they already exist. RT amplifies them. RT is really good at playing up the real problems of people who are upset with the government or feel they’re not getting a fair stake in society,” Wahl shares.
Even as the street rallies tailed off over time, and other news outlets moved on, RT continued to interview the few remaining activists. According to the network, the “corporate media,” as RT characterizes American news outlets, including the ones funded with public money, had abandoned the protestors. “It got to the point where the employees said this is it, we’re beating a dead horse here,” Wahl says. “But the news director was very adamant about continuing the coverage.”
Another important story that revealed RTs attempt at political influencing was that of US Army soldier Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning.
In 2010, Manning was suspected of disclosing US military secrets to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. The material Manning handed over included a video showing American soldiers in a military helicopter, fatally shooting employees of the Reuters news agency. Also included were several hundred thousand diplomatic cables, which bore confidential information. The material created an international scandal, and criticism of US military and diplomatic activities.
RT assigned Wahl to report on Manning’s trial. However, the point of view of how the story should be reported came from the news producers. “According to RT, Manning was a little guy blowing the whistle on the mighty US government, who alone stood up and fought for freedom of speech,” Wahl says. “For that, the US government wanted to shut him up.”
Manning was charged and later convicted of multiple crimes,4 including violations of the Espionage Act of 1917, which prohibits activities such as interfering with military operations, supporting the enemy during war, and resisting orders.5 For RT, Manning’s convictions were more proof of how “freedom of speech is suffocated in the US,” says Wahl.
Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who similarly exposed confidential US intelligence information to the global press, also received favorable treatment from RT, because he, too, made the American military and security agencies look bad.
For RT, the Manning and Snowden revelations were golden. They made the network’s information warfare efforts easy, as the channel didn’t have to invent negative news about US security structures—Manning and Snowden provided the basic information. All RT needed to do was endlessly repeat, boost, and amplify that information to the world.
Liz Wahl didn’t go to work every morning thinking that she was a cog in an international propaganda machine. She didn’t feel that her supervisors forced her to say or do anything. But a form of self-censorship was gradually planted in her mind and the minds of the rest of the staff by the management at RT. In a particular danger zone were young journalists, who didn’t possess previous experience at regular newsrooms with common journalistic practices in place to ensure factual reporting. “If you didn’t know how to provide context and how to check that your sources were sound or weren’t familiar with fact checking, RT would mold you into the perfect journalist,” Wahl says. The management appreciated those employees who were obedient and expressed hostility toward the US government. “A perfect journalist would quote RT’s guests carefully and was willing to push the envelope when it came to publishing half-truths and conspiracies whenever they made the US, NATO, or EU look bad,” Wahl shares.
An employee with the desired mentality often quickly moved up the corporate ladder.
Conversely, when a staff member wasn’t perceived as moldable, and questioned the supervisors too often, his or her career would get stuck. “If a journalist didn’t automatically self-censor, the supervisors would step in and give bad feedback. Or one of the higher-ups would edit your script, take away lines, change them, or make it more suggestive,” Wahl says.
As a result, the dominant mindset in the newsroom, was, as Wahl describes it, “anti-establishment thinking.” She witnessed many coworkers, even American citizens, becoming swept up in the conspiracy theories waged inside the walls of RT: “You feel like you’re fighting the powers that are controlling the world.”
The Russian supervisors didn’t disclose from where or from whom they received their directions. Instead, the atmosphere was secretive and mysterious. Frequently, the Russian directors would create a rundown of the next day’s planned topics and then cancel some without explanation. “There were no pressing or obvious reasons. Unless if someone from higher up forbid the coverage of some specific topics,” Wahl shares.
Even though the majority of RT’s reporting staff were American citizens with American backgrounds, the most “difficult” stories were assigned to the Russian journalists. “For example, the stories that showed the US in a bad light were given to Russian journalists,” Wahl says. “They would deliver, whereas the American anchors and reporters would feel resistant.”
One important job responsibility for Wahl was booking studio guests. Conspiracy theorists, extremists, and individuals voicing frustration and criticism toward the West were always warmly welcomed. “RT will find those voices and give them airtime, to voice their anger and disillusionment with the US government, system, and status quo,” Wahl explains.
Sometimes the producers chose the guests; other times, the reporters were tasked with finding a commentator with an “alternative” point of view. “Healthy skepticism is part of democracy. But the more furious the guest was, the more likely his comments were used as sound bites,” Wahl says.
Often, it was the channel’s regular guests who were the most belligerent in interviews. During Wahl’s tenure, the most popular political commentators included the British member of the European Parliament—and later leader of the Brexit Party—and relentless critic of the EU Nigel Farage, Infowars social media conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and action movie actor and producer Steven Seagal.
In March 2012, during the Obama presidency, Wahl interviewed Alex Jones live. The topic was Executive Order 13603, which addressed “national defense resource policies and programs under the Defense Production Act of 1950.”6 RT was biased in presenting critics of the order, many of whom characterized it as a government power grab. When Wahl asked Jones whether Americans should be alarmed by the executive order, he replied, “Americans should be extremely alarmed.”7 He then contemplated the idea of the president’s potential to “secretly kill Americans and have bags put over our heads and have us thrown into black vans to disappear forever.”
Wahl was also assigned to interview Steven Seagal. The action film star, who has no education or expertise in foreign policy, declared Vladimir Putin a strong leader. “I can’t tell you the excitement that the news producer had over Seagal. He was one of the most ridiculous people I was told to interview. But at RT, he was considered a VIP guest.” Later, Seagal was granted Russian citizenship.8 President Putin personally handed him his Russian passport in a public ceremony, which was proudly broadcast on RT. Seagal has continued advocating for Putin ever since.
Some RT interviews are so stiff and formal that they seem like preplanned performances, raising questions as to whether the guests—and reporters—were given instructions in advance.
That’s not the case, according to Wahl.
“These people don’t need to be trained,” she says. “You’ll find citizens of the United States who are willing to say things that make the US look very bad. In turn, they are in line with the Kremlin’s narrative. And on RT, there are guests with varying degrees of sanity.”
Wahl interviewed Nigel Farage on several occasions. At the time, he was not as widely known a Euro-skeptic as he is today. But at RT, he was viewed as the renegade of the European Parliament, providing “another viewpoint” and passionately bashing the EU. Later he became the face of Brexit. Coincidence or not, Brexit was vehemently pushed by the Kremlin’s social media troll farms and by RT. “Seeing the way things have played out, I have to come to understand why Farage was a preferred guest on RT,” shares Wahl. “He didn’t get that much airtime in the Western media, but for us he was a VIP.”
During the 2012 presidential election, RT drummed up its favorite candidate, Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas. By reporting on Paul, the network covered a candidate who had allegedly been “silenced” by the mainstream media. As Wahl familiarized herself with Paul’s policies, she realized that RT was obsessed with the congressman because by speaking out against US intervention in the international arena, he voiced the most critical opinions toward Western foreign policy. This in turn benefited the Kremlin, which was already planning its invasion of Ukraine.
RT’s employment recruitment policy was as revealing as its choice of guests. Journalists who stood little chance of finding work in the traditional, highly competitive field of journalism in the US became stars at RT. For example, the American social media celebrity Abby Martin, a former RT host, originally gained public attention by promoting New World Order conspiracies, accusing the powerful elite of silencing the masses through the “corporate media” and claiming that 9/11 was an “inside job.” At RT, Martin was awarded her own regular show, Breaking the Set, which aired from 2012 to 2015.
The management at RT also didn’t find it ethically questionable if a journalist covered stories about her own father’s business. That was the case with the daughter of Russia’s former ambassador to the UN, who worked at RT and covered her father without restriction, simultaneously pushing Russian political narratives.
One constant aspect of RT’s coverage is so-called media criticism.
To be clear, media criticism at RT isn’t the kind of sophisticated, scholarly, or carefully argued analysis of news standards and other elements of modern journalism which is discussed in most newsrooms’ internal feedback sessions. Instead, it is a monotonous, repetitive bashing of the traditional media, which, in reality, RT itself systematically engages in: namely, obscuring the truth, spreading propaganda, and falsifying news. For example, during Wahl’s time there, RT continually labeled the Western media as “corporate media,” which merely sought profit, with RT as the only viable alternative from which to get real news. “As RT wasn’t tied to the demand of generating profits, and the truth was its main goal, RT was the only media source that had the freedom to tell the truth. That is one way of saying how RT is superior to the Western media,” Wahl says of the how the network portrayed itself.
RT’s internal discussions about its audience relationship are revealing. Wahl recounts that the staff was never told what the ratings were, and they were never analyzed. At regular news stations, the producers follow the ratings, and they’re discussed with the staff. To Wahl, it appeared that the viewer numbers weren’t important at RT. Instead, the network’s social media presence was highlighted, as all its television segments were uploaded to YouTube. Success was measured by how frequently the audience shared and spread RT content further on social media. “The number one interest was to get the message out and build up a lot of internet traffic. YouTube views were a big thing,” Wahl says. RT America has well over one million followers on Facebook, and even though many of them are likely paid trolls, the network also has genuine fans all over the globe, who trust the channel enough to recommend its content to their social media networks—unaware of how strictly that content is censored and directed politically.
Just like other Russian disinformation and troll sites, RT knows how to attract social media viewers: sex and violence, cute animals, fear, hatred, and anything else that manipulates viewers’ emotions. To attract more young male viewers, for example, it has used porn stars as news commentators. Nonpolitical clickbait stories serve as decoys to lure unsuspecting viewers to the channel’s political content. When a viewer clicks on one video, YouTube’s algorithms recommend an endless flow of similar videos. RT likely pays for visibility on YouTube. Not many viewers would think that the content has been funded with Russian government money and produced by a channel that serves Russian national security in the information space.
And that’s the whole point.
As time went by, Wahl became increasingly uncomfortable with her employer’s mission of portraying the United States in a negative light. According to universally accepted journalistic ideals, the media should operate as a watchdog, and question the government. “But it was apparent that RT wasn’t on a virtuous mission to hold the US government accountable. It was bashing our military, our leaders, and our way of life,” Wahl says.
Wahl also became alarmed at RT’s coverage of world events, in particular the crisis in Syria. Her colleagues filed false stories claiming that the Syrian rebels had used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, leading to casualties of women and children. In fact, it was the Russian-backed Assad regime that had staged the chemical attacks against the population. Wahl found RT’s coverage on Syria horrific: “There were videos of dead children, and here you have an RT interviewee saying it was a false flag Western media conspiracy. It’s disturbing. If a chemical attack happens, the least the media can do is to try and find out who is responsible.”
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified, RT further distorted reality while presenting itself as the ultimate truth-telling outlet. Wahl felt disgusted by the network. It was time for her to leave. She gave her final live broadcast, told the audience that the channel spread propaganda and whitewashed Putin’s policies, and resigned. “You can’t stop the machine altogether, but at least you can try to spread the word. I wanted to do my part to set the record straight,” Wahl shares.
After her resignation, Wahl received supportive messages from several of her former colleagues, many of whom shared her concerns about the nature of the channel. As word of the RT anchor’s resignation spread around the world, strangers sent messages thanking her for her courageous act.
But when her now former supervisors at RT saw that the video of her resignation was spreading like wildfire online and started to receive requests for comment from traditional media outlets, they launched countermeasures. Two days after Wahl quit, RT published an online statement that condemned her behavior as unprofessional. “When a journalist disagrees with the editorial position of his or her organization, the usual course of action is to address those grievances with the editor, and, if they cannot be resolved, to quit like a professional,” the statement read.9 “But when someone makes a big public show of a personal decision, it is nothing more than a self-promotional stunt.” RT also portrayed Wahl’s resignation as a “staged psy-op.”10 The choice of words speculated that Wahl had carried out a preplanned military psychological operation.
Even Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the international RT, got involved in the smear campaign, publicly portraying the channel as a victim of the traditional Western media. According to Simonyan, the “lynching and lambasting” that RT had received from the major news organizations in the wake of Wahl’s resignation was “all typical of a media war,” in which RT “stands alone (!) face-to-face with thousands and tens of thousands of Western news outlets.”11 Simonyan would later gain international fame herself when she provided RT as an open platform to the two Russian military intelligence agents suspected of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter.12
Another attack came three days after Wahl’s resignation. Paul Joseph Watson, a protégé of Alex Jones and a promoter of far right and pro-Kremlin ideologies, released a video to his vast YouTube audience titled “The Truth about RT Host Liz Wahl’s Resignation.”13 In the video, Watson called Wahl’s action a cynical stunt that reeked of hypocrisy, using the exact same arguments as RT. Many of his viewers sent Wahl hate messages.
As part of its campaign against Wahl, RT also aired several television pieces which accused her of being a neocon. In one segment, it was speculated as to whether Wahl’s resignation was a premeditated ambush organized by a “group of neocon think tanks.” During the segment, a person dubbed by RT as a “media critic” stated that, “[t]he battle waged against RT is in fact a proxy battle for neocons, who are pushing a certain foreign policy agenda.”14 Wahl’s former colleague Abby Martin used one of her shows to frame Wahl as a “neocon.” Wahl shares that neocon is a propaganda buzzword that RT uses it to smear anyone who criticizes the Russian regime’s policies: “Since it’s so ridiculous, there’s not much meaning behind it. It’s just a slur they use. I’m not sure whether the trolls even know what it means. I never thought I was a neocon, and still don’t think I am. But apparently, I was a neocon.”
Wahl’s tweets were also embedded in RT’s online stories, attached to mocking and hateful comments. Some of the agitated feedback she received was anti-Semitic; she was called a “Jew puppet,” as well as a CIA plant who served the Western power elite. For a while, Wahl tried to ignore the slurs on social media. But as RT intensified its fake news campaign and the messages turned more aggressive, she started to find the situation disturbing.
Wahl’s Wikipedia page was also poisoned, as anonymous contributors quoted one of the network’s stories. “It smeared my character, hinted I suffered from depression and that I wasn’t mentally stable,” she says. Wahl wrote to Wikipedia and told them that the article was untrue. The false information stayed up on the site for at least a month before it was corrected, which was way too long, considering how many people searched for information about Wahl during the spring of 2014 and found the Wikipedia piece. “The damage was already done,” says Wahl. “In this kind of world, where information is so up-to-the-minute, people want to check the credibility of the source from Wikipedia.”
By calling out the network that employed her live on air, Wahl did what she felt was right. She wanted to raise the issue of the conflict in Ukraine, and the Russian media’s role in covering it. But then RT turned the spotlight on her in order to destroy her integrity as a journalist. And because she still wanted to do what was right, she was drawn into a conflict waged in cyberspace. “I think the campaign was effective. It called into question who I was as a person, and shifted the story away from Russian propaganda, how it works, and what the Kremlin is doing in Ukraine,” Wahl says.
Sometimes, she regrets having spoken out: “It has ruined my life and taken a toll on my personal life. I’m not sure whether the fight was worth it.”
Since Wahl resigned from RT, she has traveled the world, educating the general public as well as experts in Russian influence operations and cyber warfare. She is a highly respected contributor at conferences, and provides her insight to multiple initiatives that aim at countering the Kremlin’s information aggression against the West.
On April 15, 2015, Wahl testified before the US Congress about Russia’s weaponization of information. During a hearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Wahl described how RT was being mobilized as an online propaganda tool. “Why RT works is because it provides a place where people can feed off of each other’s biases. It’s like a community, almost like a cult, formed online. The people feel that they’re part of an enlightened cult fighting the establishment,” she testified. Wahl also urged congress to counteract the Kremlin’s efforts to mislead the public: “The best weapon against this rapidly expanding propaganda campaign is the truth. We just need to fight for it.”15
The same day Wahl testified, RT’s In the Now posted a report that called the house committee hearing a “Russia bashers’ get-together” and mocked the US government’s plans to fund countermeasures against Russian propaganda. Like all other RT pieces, the video was also uploaded to YouTube, where it received well over 100,000 views. The comments section of the video was polluted with hundreds of insults against Wahl.
By September 2018, the video had been up for over three years. I reported it to YouTube. To date, I have not received a response from the company. One would assume that the US-based YouTube would be interested in the fact that a foreign government systematically uses its products and services for political harassment.
Alex Jones then joined the attack against Wahl in a manner that looked like it could have been orchestrated by RT.
On his show, the Kremlin-loving, anti-American extremist excerpted the video clip of Wahl’s congressional testimony and spoke over it, commenting sarcastically on Wahl’s speech and laughing at it maliciously. He also repeated RT’s accusations that Wahl’s resignation was “staged.” Jones also claimed that Wahl was using “White House narratives” during her testimony, and described the hearing as a “sick meeting.” Jones’s colleague chimed in, saying that Wahl was a “government agent,” an accusation perfectly aligned with the popular Russian propaganda line smearing Russia experts as CIA agents.
Jones also invented quotes from Wahl, claiming that she had characterized all “people who challenge the establishment” as a cult, which Wahl never said. Jones also started yelling while reading out loud quotes from Wahl’s testimony, calling them “a total joke.”
Jones did all this knowing that his viewers would never fact check his false statements about Wahl.
While Jones’ Infowars YouTube channel has since been deleted, the video was up for years, and was copied to other channels, even though the video violated YouTube’s own regulations and clearly accused Wahl—potentially illegally and at the risk of harming her career—of being a government agent. Google search results for “Liz Wahl” show that this smear continues to make the rounds across the internet.
Liz Wahl periodically reminds herself of what she stands for, so that she won’t get distracted by the smears. “If you become intimidated and the propagandists see that their operations work, they continue their efforts,” she says. “But as long as the targets speak out and people keep calling it out, the harassment loses effectiveness. The same works with propaganda.”
After leaving RT, Wahl went on to work for Newsy, a Washington-based social media news outlet. There, she produced mini-documentaries about Russian hybrid warfare, influence operations, and online conspiracy theories. She often provides her insight on Russia issues as a commentator for CNN and other media outlets. In addition, she hosts international conferences and was a congressional candidate from Texas in 2020. It seems that the operation against her has backfired, as the perpetrators didn’t succeed in harassing her into silence.
Wahl shares that exchanging supportive messages with people who appreciate her efforts has helped her overcome the pressure exerted on her by a foreign state: “It’s encouraging to get inspirational messages from people in Ukraine and in the Baltic states who are very worried about Russian influence. The messages make you feel like you’re fighting the good fight.”
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice demanded that RT register as a foreign agent. In the spring of 2018, the channel was taken off the air in the Washington, DC area.16
Despite these actions, RT still continues full force in the United States. Its shows are still broadcast, uploaded to YouTube and shared on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.