Russian news network seeks presence in Cuba and rest of Latin America
The RT global news network is currently in talks with Cuba and Ecuador over broadcasting its programs in those countries, RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonovna Simonyan (in photo at top), said Thursday (Oct. 29.) in Moscow.
“Last year in Argentina, we started broadcasting our channel on the public federal network. We did there what we did in Russia — we gave away free samples [of our work.] Right after that, we did the same with Venezuela and Bolivia. Now, talks are taking place with Ecuador and Cuba,” Simonyan told the newspaper Izvestia in the course of a long interview on global TV news coverage.
[To access RTNoticias/Argentina’s Twitter page, click here.]
“We are ready to give our programming free of charge to huge audiences in all those countries,” she added. “And, by the way, [the digital media analyst] ComScore reports that our Spanish-speaking site is more popular in Latin America than CNN en Español.”
During the Russia-Ecuador talks in June, the sides agreed that RT could launch its services in Ecuador later this year.
It was not clear from the Izvestia interview whether RT hoped to have its own frequency in Cuba for 24-hour broadcasting, or if it would have specific time slots in the state-owned Cubavisión station.
Formerly called Russia Today, RT is a Moscow-based, state-funded news network that broadcasts round the clock in English, Spanish and Arabic. It has been nominated for Emmy awards for its coverage of the hunger strike by inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison (2014), the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York (2012), and President’s Obama visit to Moscow (2010.)
Its English-language service was launched in 2005 “to reflect Russia’s position on the main issues of international politics.” Its Spanish-language service premiered in 2009. In the past two years, it has significantly expanded its broadcasting across Latin America.
[To access RT’s website, click here.]
Parenthetically, Simonyan, a Russian journalist of Armenian descent, speaks neither Spanish nor Arabic.
