Russian blogger ordered to pay news channel Russia Today half a million rubles for saying it ‘invents news’

Popular Russian blogger Rustem Adagamov has been ordered by a Moscow City court to pay international news channel Russia Today (RT) half a million rubles (close to $8,000).

The payment is compensation for any damages caused to RT's reputation from an article Adagamov published on his blog, which asserted the news channel “invents news.”

“Look at how Russia Today creates news from nothing,” is the blogger's offending sentence.

In a conversation with news website Tjournal, Adagamov said he was completely unaware of the legal case against him. “I do not understand what's going on. The first time I heard about it was from you,” Adagamov told Tjournal reporters.

The blogger has the ability to appeal the Moscow City court's ruling; he still has a chance to not pay RT for any perceived damages to its reputation for news reporting.

Indeed, Adagamov is certainly not the first person to criticize RT's reporting. In a 2015 court case initiated by the BBC, the UK's TV news regulator ruled that RT had faked TV news reports on the war in Syria.

In 2014, TV news journalist Sara Firth resigned on air from RT, because she believed it was intentionally spreading misinformation about the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. “It was the most shockingly obvious misinformation and it got to the point where I couldn’t defend it any more,” Firth told the Guardian newspaper.