Sputnik (news agency)
Sputnik is a Russian state-owned news agency and radio broadcast service. It was established by the Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya on 10 November 2014. With headquarters in Moscow, Sputnik maintains regional editorial offices in Washington, D.C., Cairo, Beijing, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. Sputnik describes itself as being focused on global politics and economics and aims for an international audience.
Sputnik is frequently described by academics and journalists as a Russian propaganda outlet. In 2016, Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times wrote: "The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events—even the very idea that there is a true version of events—and foster a kind of policy paralysis." The Russian government rejects the validity of such assertions. In early 2019, Facebook removed hundreds of pages on its social media platform passing as independent news sites but were actually under the control of Sputnik employees.
Sputnik operates news websites, featuring reporting and commentary, in 31 languages including English, Spanish, Arabic and Serbian. The websites house over 800 hours of radio broadcasting material each day, and its newswire service runs a 24/7 service.
Sputnik was banned in the European Union in February 2022 following the start of Russo-Ukrainian war. Technology companies and social media services responded to the war by removing Sputnik from their platforms, while many versions such as the French, the German and the Greek ones have closed their operation.
History
was Russia's international news agency until 9 December 2013 when it became known as Rossiya Segodnya. Dmitry Kiselev, an anchorman of the Russia-1 channel was appointed to be the first president of the reorganized agency. He soon announced that Margarita Simonyan was to be editor-in-chief. Simonyan told The New York Times in 2017 that she choose Sputnik as the new name "because I thought that's the only Russian word that has a positive connotation, and the whole world knows it."Sputnik was launched on 10 November 2014 by Rossiya Segodnya, which is itself funded through RT, owned and operated by the Russian government, and was created via an Executive Order of the President of Russia on 9 December 2013. As well as the RIA Novosti news agency, Sputnik's origins can be traced to 1929 when Radio Moscow was launched as the official international broadcasting station of Soviet Union airing across the country, Eastern Europe and Cuba until it was replaced by Voice of Russia in 1993 along with the foreign language services of RIA Novosti. RT UK was launched a fortnight earlier. According to its editor-in-chief Dmitry Kiselyov, Sputnik was intended to reach a worldwide audience "tired of aggressive propaganda promoting a unipolar world and who want a different perspective". The station claims it "tells the untold". However, President Vladimir Putin, while visiting the Moscow base of the RT television network in 2013, said the objective behind both the then forthcoming Sputnik agency and RT was to "break the monopoly of the Anglo-Saxon global information streams."
In April 2017, Sputnik signed a personnel exchange deal with the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party tabloid.
Radio services
Radio Sputnik is the audio service of the Sputnik platform operating in 30 languages "for a total of over 800 hours a day, covering over 130 cities and 34 countries on "FM, DAB/DAB+, HD Radio, as well as mobile phones and the Internet." It is available on satellite transponders, including a 24-hour English service audible in North America via the Galaxy-19 satellite. Among the station's presenters are Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert who host the weekly talk show Double Down which concentrates on economics. Another talk show is By Any Means Necessary which is hosted by Eugene Puryear, while liberal talk radio host Thom Hartmann presents his own program which is syndicated on Sputnik each day.Regarding plans for the U.S. broadcast market, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik U.S. said in a June 2017 interview that there were no immediate plans for expansion into markets beyond Washington, D.C. This came on the heels of a late June 2017 announcement that Radio Sputnik would sublease Reston, Virginia-licensed translator station W288BS from Reston Translator, LLC, which transmits from the WIAD tower in Bethesda, Maryland, and begin broadcasting Sputnik on that signal; the station's reach includes DC proper and the western suburbs in Northern Virginia. From November 2017, Radio Sputnik began to be carried on AM in Washington, D.C., on WZHF 1390 AM. The American owners of the stations were required to register as a foreign agent by the United States Department of Justice.
Sputnik is blocked from owning an American radio station outright due to Federal Communications Commission rules against foreign ownership of broadcast assets, as enacted in the Communications Act of 1934. Prior to 1 July 2017, Radio Sputnik had broadcast in the Washington, D.C., area on WTOP-HD2 since June 2013, if not earlier. W288BS translates Urban One's WKYS 's digital HD3 signal for analog broadcasting.
Sputnik distributes its programming to American stations via brokered programming, through agent Arnold Ferolito and his holding company RM Broadcasting, LLC. Its availability in Kansas City, Missouri on stations KCXL and KOJH from the beginning of January 2020 was contentious, especially in the latter case because the station has a jazz-centered community radio format and led to a clash on the radio spectrum.
Following the closure of the Echo of Moscow station on 3 March 2022, its frequencies were taken over by Radio Sputnik.
On 1 August 2025, Radio Sputnik came to Brazil, in the capital of Rio de Janeiro, through 80.5 in FM.
Coverage of the United States
Trump and Clinton
During the 2016 presidential election campaign, according to former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul writing in The Washington Post, Sputnik made clear publicly its preference for the then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump over the Democrat's nominee Hillary Clinton.According to a fake news story circulated by Sputnik, President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton created ISIS; the website praised Trump, before he was elected in 2016, for making such an assertion. The website published an article entitled "Secret File Confirms Trump Claim: Obama, Hillary 'Founded ISIS' to Oust Assad", while tweets from Sputnik used the hashtag #CrookedHillary. Trump revived another discredited conspiracy theory promoted by Sputnik that Google was suppressing bad news about Clinton.
In October 2016, Sputnik improperly cited an article written by Kurt Eichenwald for Newsweek misattributing comments to Hillary Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal. Sputnik took down the article. Aspects of his story as it related to Trump were disputed at the time, Sputnik then put up an article reputedly denying its control by the Kremlin and attacking Newsweek and Eichenwald. He wrote that the Trump campaign emailed reporters a link to the Sputnik article and asked them to follow up on the story. The author of the Sputnik article, Bill Moran, successfully sued Newsweek over his assertion that Eichenwald had used bribery and threats.
Forbes reported that Sputnik International reported fake news and fabricated statements by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest during the 2016 presidential election. Sputnik falsely reported on 7 December 2016 that Earnest stated sanctions for Russia were on the table related to Syria, falsely quoting Earnest as saying: "There are a number of things that are to be considered, including some of the financial sanctions that the United States can administer in coordination with our allies. I would definitely not rule that out." Forbes analyzed Earnest's White House press briefing from that week, and found the word "sanctions" was never used by the Press Secretary. Russia was discussed in eight instances during the press conference, but never about sanctions. The press conference focused solely on Russian air raids in Syria towards rebels fighting President of Syria Bashar al-Assad in Aleppo.
Lee Stranahan was hired by Sputnik News after his departure from Breitbart News and, according to The Washington Post, he is Sputnik's most visible Trump supporter". In early 2020, at the time of the Impeachment of President Trump, Stranahan stated "the entire impeachment is a lie." The Washington Post stated that "many Sputnik hosts profess skepticism that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election," in contradiction to the assessment of the US intelligence community.
Andrew Feinberg's account
On 26 May 2017, Andrew Feinberg, who had been Sputnik's White House Correspondent since the Trump administration came into office the previous January, announced on Twitter that he would no longer be reporting for the agency. He said those in charge were more interested in employing "propagandists" rather than "real journalists". In one tweet he explained the agency's policy in article's attribution: "The truth is they don't want their reporters to have their own reputations, b/c a lie is easier when it doesn't come with a byline." He told Erik Wemple of The Washington Post: "It's the fact that if you don't have bylines on stories and there's no one accountable for words, then you can really print whatever you want. Sputnik, in a statement to The Washington Post, accused Feinberg of making "false accusations" and expressed the "hope that the fruits of his rich imagination would not create more conspiracy theories around Sputnik."Feinberg, in discussing his period at Sputnik, said that Sputnik's editors asked him to write stories and ask questions at the White House press conference about the conspiracy theory between the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich in Washington and the leaking of DNC documents to WikiLeaks. Feinberg wrote of his discomfort as "there was absolutely no factual basis for doing so." The District of Columbia police believed that Rich had been murdered while being robbed. Feinberg believed that the editors wanted to shift blame for the leaking of the DNC documents from Russian hackers to Rich. Sputnik News has published articles promoting conspiracy theories about the murder of Seth Rich.
In an interview with Brian Stelter for CNN, Feinberg said that Sputnik management had insisted on approving or dictating questions he would ask at White House press briefings, and wanted him to ask questions to imply that the April 2017 Sarin gas attack in Syria was a hoax: "I was asked to put questions to the White House that framed the issue in such a way that made it seem that the attack didn't happen, that it was staged," In particular, he was asked to raise at the White House the assertions made by Ted Postol querying Syrian responsibility for the attack. On that occasion, he was not called. Feinberg wrote in a Politico August 2017 article, he had concluded after the request that Sputnik's "mission wasn't really to report the news as much as it was to push a narrative that would either sow doubts about situations that weren't flattering to Russia or its allies, or hurt the reputation of the United States and its allies."