A bizarre moment on television occurred earlier today after a live broadcast of C-SPAN was interrupted by Russia Today, the country’s state-funded news network. Although is currently investigating the matter, some believe that the incident is proof of Russia hacking U.S. media.
Prior to the incident, C-SPAN was broadcasting a live coverage of the Congress’ discussion regarding the Regulatory Accountability Act of the Securities and Exchange Commission. As Democratic Representative Maxine Waters of California was delivering her piece, the coverage was suddenly interrupted by a live feed from Russia Today, which now goes by the name RT.
In a span of 10 minutes, the RT held C-SPAN’s airtime. The feed first showed a segment showing headlines taken from Twitter before cutting to an RT news anchor reporting on a suicide bombing.
Many users on Twitter saw the interruption and posted about it on their social media accounts. Timothy Burke, the editor for Deadspin, was even able to capture the brief moment when C-SPAN’s broadcast was taken over by RT.
Following the incident, C-SPAN released a statement to address the matter. Although the public affairs network noted that it believes the interruption was caused by a routing issue, C-SPAN stated that it will continue investigating the matter.
“This afternoon the online feed for C-SPAN was briefly interrupted by RT programming,” the network said in a statement according to IBT. “We are currently investigating and troubleshooting this occurrence. As RT is one of the networks we regularly monitor, we are operating under the assumption that it was an internal routing issue. If that changes we will certainly let you know.”
Although the incident could simply be the result of a technical issue, some viewers believe that it is proof that Russia hacked the U.S. media and the elections. During the previous months, U.S. intelligence agencies accused RT of spreading fake news in an attempt to influence the U.S. elections.
