Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes all you need to do to create propaganda is just show some unpopular facts in isolation. Sure, they're biased, but that doesn't mean they are always outright lying -- at least not more than American media. The idea of a unbiased news is a pipedream. I'm fully aware that German public television was intentionally created in a way that would supposedly protect it from the government's influence, but that doesn…
The propaganda of RT is pretty easy to spot almost everywhere and is systemic. > Sometimes all you need to do to create propaganda is just show some unpopular facts in isolation RT does quite a bit more than that. In Russia there are less alternatives to state media. CNN, sure, I would not trust them, too.
English RT and English Al Jazeera are international channels, like BBC World.
That said, some of the programming on RT is pretty similar in nature to what you'd find on, say, Arirang TV (an English South Korean channel). I.e. less (political) propaganda and more good old (commercial) PR.
If I'd have to say anything good about RT versus other international news channels, it's their coverage of the protests in Turkey. Even in Germany (where Turkey is seen as no more foreign than Greece or Italy and a significant share of the population has ties to Turkey) the protests were at best a footnote of the regular news reporting. RT on the other hand would have reporters right in the middle of it, getting teargassed and documenting the different motivations for the various groups involved.
Oh, and of course our media was extremely supportive of the rebellion in Syria despite the growing influence of Islamist groups. Until they decided to change directions completely when ISIS/ISIL showed up. And now they refer to them (supposedly objectively!) as "terror militia IS".
Frankly, calling anything a "terror militia" while pretending to be objective is pretty damn insulting. It completely discards any notion of them having any motives or being in fact humans. It's how you talk about an enemy in your propaganda when you're at war, it's not how you cover a news story.
Calling German media "Lügenpresse" is silly, but not because it's outrageously inaccurate. It's silly because all media is inadvertently lying. You can't just present the "facts" because they're inconsistent, disjointed and confusing (because they're not only incomplete, but also always subjective). But as soon as you start to create a narrative, you're simplifying the facts and introducing a biased perspective. Yet you have to create narratives to make the news relateable and interesting to your audience (and stakeholders).
What's the alternative? I don't think there is one. Blogging and "YouTube journalism" is a start, but it's already been subverted at this point. It's no more difficult to feed misleading or biased information via individual "citizen reporters" than it is to influence corporate/national media. I guess correct attribution would go a long way, but now that "official" news programmes directly copy YouTube videos and online articles seem to be more about editorialising than citing the actual sources, I don't see that happening -- no party (other than the audience) would benefit from more accountability in the news, sadly.