Poll-Bound US Gets A Whipping Boy In Russian Radio

The Russians are here, Americans are being warned. Kremlin-funded Radio Sputnik's expansion to Kansas City has ruffled a few feathers. A couple of mainstream media organizations have called the broadcast propaganda, reflecting the intelligence agencies' apprehension that the Russian government could use Sputnik and Russia Today to interfere with the presidential election.

U.S. intelligence suspected that the Russian government used its broadcast arms to influence American voters in the 2016 election.

Radio Sputnik, which began broadcasting in Washington, DC in July 2017, went on air in Kansas in January. The five local stations in Kansas City and Washington, DC are is handled by Americans from a studio in the nation's capital.

Radio Sputnik's first broadcast in London in 2014 was also met with distrust by the BBC, which itself is a government-funded media outlet. Nato viewed it as pure propaganda.

"It is a way, not to convince people, but to confuse them, not to provide an alternative viewpoint, but to divide public opinions and to ultimately undermine our ability to understand what is going on and therefore take decisions if decisions need to be made," Nato spokesperson Oana Lungescu said at the time.

A morning show from Sputnik in Washington opens with the line, “Welcome to the divided states of America.” A radio station cannot divide the country as much as the partisan bickering in Congress.

The New York Times and CBS Radio called Sputnik's U.S. broadcast Russian propaganda. Sputnik, however, gives the Americans alternative voices generally ignored by the mainstream press. They have existed on the Internet for years.

Sputnik had faced some headwind even as it tried to get a foothold in the United States. In May 2019, a federal judge ordered Florida-based RM Broadcasting LLC, which hunts for airtime to sell to the Russian state media organization behind Sputnik, to register as a foreign agent .

On Sputnik's morning show on Wednesday, Garland Nixon said the CBS article amounted to nothing.

“What I see with this, and most of the assertions these days, is that they are superficial at best. OK, Garland Nixon is on the air right now and he is doing propaganda..... OK that’s fine. Talk to me about the propaganda. You’re not going to get anything. Accuse me of something, but give me some substantiation," he said.

Noticible by its absence in the discussion is Voice of America, the largest U.S. international broadcaster with a mandate to spread U.S. propaganda.