Report: Russian news service RT to go off air in Washington on Sun

MOSCOW, Mar 30 (PRIME) -- Russia’s English-language broadcasting network RT, described by U.S. intelligence agencies as part of Moscow’s “state-run propaganda machine,” will disappear from television screens in Washington at midnight Sunday, Bloomberg reported late on Thursday.

That is when WNVT and WNVC, a pair of digital stations in northern Virginia that carry about a dozen foreign news services including RT, will go off the air. It is a year to the day since the station’s owner auctioned off its share of the airwaves for use by developers of wireless applications.

RT will also disappear from local cable systems, which are required by federal law to carry all broadcasters in their area. Attention turned to RT’s broadcasts as intelligence agencies probed separate Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Anna Belkina, RT’s deputy editor in chief, wrote in an e-mail that RT would continue to work with distribution partners in the nation’s capital and beyond. She added that the Justice Department, which required RT’s U.S. production company to register with it under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, had made that more difficult.

“The registration in fact has placed undue burden on multiple areas of RT operations, and pressure on our partners as well,” Belkina said in the e-mail.

RT, formerly known as Russia Today, bills itself as a 24/7 news operation that provides alternative sources of information, with the slogan “Question More.” It continues to air in other U.S. cities through a variety of arrangements, including on television systems in many hotels.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

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