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Someone changed the content of the Spanish Television broadcast, but the first official version of the chain says it was something done from within. Last Thursday +24 , one of the online channels of TVE, passed without notice to broadcast the signal of the Spanish channel of RT , the Russian television with which Moscow disseminates its world view abroad. Just then RT was interviewing the former president of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont. RTVE has reacted today but does not talk about hacking , but about an "unplanned internal video signal".

The public entity today issued a note about the event, pointing to internal authorship. "RTVE has reviewed the internal processes of said broadcast and the first conclusions rule out that there was an external computer sabotage."

The channel has acknowledged that "the RTVE website issued an unplanned internal video signal from Russia Today [RT] on one of its digital accessory channels last Thursday." This "unplanned internal video signal" was followed, according to RTVE data "throughout the day by 864 unique users and, in the range of 4 to 5 in the afternoon, by 96". A 'interference' less in scope but very rare in origin.

The strange event was first denounced by the Asturian media El Comercio , which even disseminated screenshots. In them the logo of the channel +24 shares a screen with that of RT, which has channels in several languages. During that time, instead of the planned schedule, the former president of the Generalitat , Carles Puigdemont, was interviewed by the former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa. As explained by a viewer who followed the broadcast, when the interview ended, the programming of the Russian channel followed, which coincided with the one that RT was currently broadcasting on its official platform.

The event became relevant when the head of the RT channel, Margarita Simonyan , congratulated herself on Monday night for the fact that the +24 channel involuntarily disseminated this interview of the former Ecuadorian leader to the former escaped president. "We don't know who did it. But it was beautiful," he said on his Telegram channel.

The program of the former Ecuadorian president is called Conversations with Correa and through him have been characters such as Pablo Iglesias, Baltasar Garzón, Lula da Silva, Ada Colau, Evo Morales, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Beppe Grillo, among others. The interview focused on Catalan independence, the right to self-determination, the popular will and the integrity of the State.

Although Moscow does not allow the propaganda of independence movements in Russia, Puigdemont is not an unknown face in RT. He was already interviewed by former Scottish independence prime minister Alex Salmond , to whom RT also gave a program after leaving Scottish politics. "We just had an interview with Puigdemont, who is the main leader for the independence of Catalonia. Our transmission lasted all night," Simonyan celebrated the day before yesterday.

Interferences with humor

Countries such as the US , Spain or the United Kingdom are investigating Moscow's alleged interference in their internal political processes, which has not prevented RT from taking it with humor. In 2018, a former Russian spy, Sergey Skripal , suffered an assassination attempt in Salisbury (United Kingdom). The British government identified two Russian agents hanging around the area on the days of the attack. Then, the director of the RT channel gave them an interview in which they presented themselves as two simple tourists so interested in Salisbury Cathedral to fly to London and sleep there in a cheap hotel, traveling during the day to the town two days followed and start back to Moscow without just seeing the British capital. The delirious interview was criticized by several independent Russian media such as the Dozhd channel, that Christmas received a surprising gift from RT: a chocolate replica of Salisbury Cathedral inside a box with the RT logo. Several critical media with the government received the same 'gift'. From the town of Salisbury political representatives criticized the frivolity of RT for making a cake related to an event that almost killed his two objectives (Skripal and his daughter) and that ended the life of a woman who was in the area.

At the moment there are few clues about who 'plugged in' the Kremlin's favorite signal on Spanish TV. It is not the first case in which the Russian television signal is 'sneaked' into another country's channel without prior notice. In 2017, instead of a live speech by US Congresswoman Maxine Waters on the American television network C-SPAN , viewers were shown a RT program. In this new interference the beneficiary has been Puigdemont, who has found in the RTVE channel an unexpected platform for his pulse to the State.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Russia
  • TVE
  • Carles Puigdemont
  • Catalonia independence
  • Catalonia
  • Spain
  • Rafael Correa

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