Despite dominating media coverage for a few months, and arguably helping trigger the rise of the Arab Spring, Wikileaks kept a pretty low profile in the second half of 2011. Last month, founder Julian Assange broke his silence with an interview for Rolling Stone magazine. Now comes word that Assange, currently under house arrest in the UK, will be hosting a talk show series:
Julian Assange, the founder of the controversial WikiLeaks website, announced on Sunday that he was moving even further into the spotlight as host of a TV talk show. "The World Tomorrow" will feature conversations with "key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world," he said.
With Assange aspiring to be a mix of Oprah Winfrey and Harvey Levin (with lots more state secrets), the only question seemed to be, what channel would air such a talk show?
The answer: Russian TV. The English-language channel RT, founded by the Kremlin in 2005, will be carrying the new show starting in March.
The series will consist of 10 half-hour interviews, airing each week beginning in March.
Assange will be getting a big audience. RT reaches 600 million people, and is hugely popular on YouTube - "the first news channel to break the 500 million YouTube views benchmark." Of course, the choice is unlikely to make Assange any more popular among the U.S. media and political establishment. As ABC News puts it:
The show, which launches in March, will air on Russia Today, or RT, a Kremlin-run group of news channels that has been criticized by a wide range of Western media outlets, from the Economist to the Guardian, for allegedly airing pro-Putin and anti-U.S. propaganda, as well as conspiracy theories.
This is laying it on a bit thick IMO. True, a majority of funding for RT's parent organization comes from the Russian government. But how does that compare with Al-Jazeera, funded by the emir of Qatar - or for that matter, the BBC and NPR?
Based on my experience watching it, RT definitely has a point of view - but tends more towards a critique of neoliberal Western policy than anything overtly pro-Putin or pro-Russian. It also features programming, such as The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann and The Alyona Show, that would not be out of place on Current TV or even MSNBC.