Larry King has joined the RT network to launch a brand new political show. According to RT:
Award-winning interviewer Larry King will host a mold-breaking political talk show on RT from next month, speaking to both leading establishment figures, and those who are not afraid to go against the grain.
What is RT? RT stands for Russia Today and, in short, it’s the Western version of Pravda. As England’s weekly magazine The NewStatesman observes:
Through an editorial policy of letting pretty much anyone on air and with cash backing from the Kremlin, it has become a televisual home for disaffected viewers in the west, a refuge for the Occupy and hacktivist generation, which believes that its own countries’ TV stations are in the pocket of corporate interests. Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief, is even prepared to call it the “anti-Fox News”…
…In October last year, Putin personally intervened to block a finance ministry proposal to cut RT’s funding. The channel will receive more than £250m this year, approximately the same sum as the BBC World Service received from the British government in 2011- 2012. And where the World Service will lose its direct government funding from 2014 and be paid from the licence fee instead, thus squeezing its budget, Putin will keep RT healthily supplied with cash.
King must still feel burned by CNN for escorting him out the door and replacing him with perennial ratings loser Piers Morgan, but does he really want the coda to his career to be a show on a network that is really nothing more than a propaganda organ for Vladimir Putin’s government?