On Monday, journalist Abby Martin dismissed accusations that she colluded with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Martin is the latest independent journalist to fall victim to a new “Red Scare” that seeks to shift the blame for the Democratic Party’s political problems onto Russia.
On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a declassified version of “Background to ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections’: The Analytic Process and Cyber Incident Attribution,” a report which purports to document Russia’s alleged interference in the election.
Despite the report’s technical-sounding title, a sizable portion of the document is concerned not with cyber attacks, but with unfavorable coverage of the U.S. government and American politics broadcast on RT, the Russian state-owned news network that has been a target of repeated U.S. government threats. The report specifically highlights Martin’s show, “Breaking the Set,” which ran on RT from September of 2012 until February of 2015, and another RT program called “Truthseeker” for being “overwhelmingly focused on criticism of US and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent.”
In Monday’s interview, Martin appeared alongside Anya Parampil, a host at RT America who worked as a producer on “Breaking the Set.” Martin defended the accuracy and importance of her work as a journalist, suggesting RT was actually targeted for critical investigative journalism that cast Washington in an unfavorable light. Martin continued:
