A new news reality show starting today on Russia Today (DStv 407), News Team, will be following several of th 24-hour TV news channel's reporters - including the two South Africans who work for RT - Paula Slier and Thabang Motsei.
News Team starting at 12:30 (South African time) will be broadcast on RT on Wednesdays from today for the next 22 weeks with repeats on Thursdays and Saturdays. According to RT News Team offers "an unprecedented glimpse into the world of field journalists".
The docu reality show was produced by Josh Silberman who says he developed an interest in doing a TV show about news correspondents "because it doesn't get any more real, unpredictable or exciting than news, especially in a war zone".
"Rather than being a series about television or news, it's a TV show about people - people who risk their lives to tell the world about what is happening outside of their living rooms".
News Team which is shot in a documentary reality series format, follows South Africa's Thabang Motsei and Paula Slier, the Englishman Peter Oliver, as well as the Russians Maria Finoshina, Egor Piskunov and Alexey Yaroshevsky as RT reporters.
Viewers will see Paula Slier ending up in a gas attack in the West Bank for instance.
Since Russia's military invasion of the Ukraine's Crimea peninsula last month, the Kremlin-based TV news channel went into a blatantly slanted and propaganda fuelled news delivery style.
That has dented not only RT's reputation but especially the credibility of Thabang Motsei who, as an RT anchor, suddenly started reading biased news reports and doing slanted interviews with people of a mind-boggling nature. It makes for unintentionally hilarious viewing, harking back to Cold War era type propaganda news reels.
