RT's journalist Gayane Chichakyan, for example, has become a kind of a legend among some American podcasters for asking straight and inconvenient, but certainly valid questions at State Department’s press conferences.
And while comedy shows such as The Daily Show or The Late Show with Stephen Colbert are almost indistinguishable from each other in their messages, RT's Redacted Tonight (https://www.rt.com/shows/redacted-tonight-summary/) is radically different and gives the voice to the comedy of the very far left.
I think I understand the concept of lies by omission. Perhaps RT does that. And yet, I am not sure that giving a one-sided account of events is worse than not bringing them up at all. Like that accusation of Wikileaks’ selectively targeting the democrats and being silent about the republicans — I am not convinced that this one-sidedness in any way invalidates what Wikileaks had to say about the democrats. Likewise, if RT does not report on the stories that can be damaging to the Russian side, this should not make their other stories, potentially damaging to the other sides, somehow invalid.
RT has played the strategy of going in and eating the domestic media's lunch when they hesitate to cover legitimate stories, and that has given them a dedicated following. Unfortunately, as time has passed, it has grown more clear (at least to me) that this bona-fide coverage is the bait they pull people in with, and that their coverage in general is of the journalistic quality of Fox News. They use the same tactics of lying through omission, stoking panic, appealing to emotion, and selecting stories to promote an agenda.
As for the social media shilling, the situation is extremely nuanced. At this point there are probably tens of thousands of organizations astroturfing social media to promote their interests. Russia gets a lot of attention, because they seem to be doing it on the largest scale in terms of influencing geopolitics, but I agree that they aren't the only ones doing it, and that if we make them stop, the problem won't go away. The media has spoken up a lot about Russia's twitter/facebook botting and shilling, but if we were to take a much closer look at the data, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see some shady domestic political think tanks and action committees doing it to the same extent. In fact, the shadowy domestic PACs engaging in astroturfing are probably ecstatic that Russia has taken the focus (and blame) off of them! The Internet has become a ideological battleground, and at this point, anybody who has any power to gain/lose has rolled up their sleeves and entered into the fray. I'm not quite sure what to do about it.