RT Chief Editor Says Audience Growing Despite Pressure

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The audience of the RT international news channel has been on the rise in the past couple of years despite continued pressure from Western governments, its editor-in-chief said in an interview.

"The latest research figures that came in showed our global audience has grown by a third while they… this truth-seeking democracy-loving world was busy fighting us," Margarita Simonyan told a Russian broadcaster, Zvezda.

An Ipsos poll that came out in early April estimated that RT’s weekly audience in the 38 countries that were initially surveyed in 2015 grew from 70 million to 95 million. With nine countries counted in, the total viewership was at 100 million.

Pressure has been growing on the broadcaster in the United States and Europe over propaganda claims. It was forced to register as a "foreign agent" in the United States following the 2016 election and was labelled as a threat in a European Parliament resolution on propaganda.