The Scrapbook spent a few days driving around with the station on, and if you’re looking for bizarro-world news and endless gabfests about how America is populated with imperialist running dogs, well, Sputnik Radio is for you. The station’s Moscow-mandated agenda is impossible to ignore. There’s an obsession with the prospect of missile defense systems being deployed in Europe, and NATO is an epithet—member countries are derided as “vassal states” of America. There’s a lot of talk about Syria. And if it were up to Sputnik Radio, Oliver Stone would win an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Pulitzer for his “Putin Interviews.”
And yet, for all the dark intimations we keep hearing about a Trump-Russia conspiracy, there’s nothing on Sputnik Radio about American greatness. Instead, there’s an abundance of warmed-over Cold War talking points, barely updated. Listening to Sputnik is like entering a time-warped universe where one could be forgiven for mistaking the pro-Russian propaganda for good old Soviet agitprop.
Mindia Gavasheli, the editor overseeing Sputnik, has big plans: “We hope that our entrance onto the Washington market is just the first step, and will strive to ensure that more and more people are able to hear our broadcasts instead of rumors about them.” No doubt there will be, if they can find more station owners willing to take Kremlin cash.
