What happened
RT (formerly Russia Today) operated under a UK licence held by ANO TV-Novosti, funded by the Russian state. Its function — documented across successive Ofcom findings rather than merely asserted — was to advance Kremlin narratives inside the media systems of adversary states.
The regulatory record: in 2019 Ofcom found seven breaches of due impartiality rules in RT's coverage of the Skripal poisoning and the war in Syria, calling them "serious failures" and imposing a £200,000 sanction. After the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Ofcom opened 29 investigations into RT's war coverage in under three weeks — an unprecedented volume against a single broadcaster — before concluding that no volume of case-by-case enforcement could address the underlying problem: the licensee answered to a state that had criminalised independent war reporting domestically.
The revocation matters to the media layer in both directions. It documents what RT was, through a regulator's findings rather than an editorial judgment. And it demonstrates that a broadcast-era regulatory framework can, eventually, act — while having no equivalent purchase on the online ecosystem where RT's content simply continued to circulate after the licence was gone.
Evidentiary class: regulator ruling (Ofcom licence revocation, 2022; prior sanction, 2019).