MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Mainstream media is overly dramatic in its coverage of a brief interruption of US C-SPAN feed by RT broadcaster, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said Friday.
On Thursday, the US network C-SPAN's video broadcast of a US Congress session was interrupted by RT feed for about 10 minutes.
Here's the moment Russia Today took over the C-SPAN1 feed. Unclear what happened. RT aired for about ten minutes before C-SPAN1 came back. pic.twitter.com/mhWVgCoFxF
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) 12 января 2017 г.
"C-SPAN itself has already said the feed interruption was an internal malfunction, but mainstream [media] are still going into hysterics saying we hacked them. Our newsroom ran out of popcorn watching this," Simonyan told RIA Novosti.
Earlier on Friday, C-SPAN said in a statement that an internal routing error caused the incident.
"We don't believe that we were hacked," the statement read.
Statement from C-SPAN about January 12 Online Signal Interruption pic.twitter.com/dlkSOntJgz
— CSPAN (@cspan) 13 января 2017 г.
On January 6, the US Intelligence Community released a report saying it had "high confidence" in Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The report did not provide any evidence that the alleged propaganda campaign had an effect on US voters or specific election results, but alleged that Russia employs a state run propaganda machine including domestic media, RT and the Sputnik news agency, to serve to promote the Kremlin policies and, in case of RT America, to undermine the audience's trust in the US government.
Moscow has repeatedly denied all allegations of interference in US election.
