(Bloomberg) — U.K. media regulator Ofcom banned Russian state-backed news station RT from broadcasting in the country.
Ofcom said RT’s U.K. license holder ANO TV Novosti was not “fit and proper” to hold a license, in a statement Friday. Ofcom was investigating 29 cases opened in recent weeks around the so-called due impartiality required by the channel, which focused on its coverage of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was already tricky to watch RT, formerly called Russia Today, in the U.K. because EU-regulated satellite distributors stopped broadcasting the channel earlier in the month following sanctions, as did the biggest technology platforms like Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube.
Ofcom said it appears impossible for RT to comply with due impartiality rules and “we cannot be satisfied that RT can be a responsible broadcaster in the current circumstances.” It previously fined the channel 200,000 pounds ($263,000) for its coverage of war in Syria and the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the English city of Salisbury.
Ofcom said that RT is funded by Russia, which invaded a neighboring sovereign country, and that “new laws in Russia which effectively criminalize any independent journalism that departs from the Russian state’s own news narrative, in particular in relation to the invasion of Ukraine.”
In an emailed statement, RT deputy editor-in-chief Anna Belkina said the decision showed that Ofcom, “despite a well-constructed facade of independence, it is nothing more than a tool of government, bending to its media-suppressing will.”
(Updates with RT statement)
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