I'd recommend the following for reading on RT and how the Russian government owned outlet utilizes propaganda in a "soft" way: https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/70/5/623/5912109 . I'd also recommend reading https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464884920941967 for an analysis on how RT handled the 2018 Skripal poisonings. Even more disturbing is their MH17 coverage.

You might want to read up on them. Getting people to go 'oh its all the same' is pretty much the mission of these types of outlets. RT works by seeming like just another news source while subtly pushing the agenda on key issues of the Russian state.

Yes, because NYT and WaPo did so well with the Trump-Russian collusion stuff, right? ... oh...

The simpler story would have been trump is a chump surrounded by grasping idiots who could be used / supported by Russia. I thought that would have been a bit easier to argue for than this big collusion.

You should check their MH17 coverage.

MH17 is very illustrative example in the context of OP. The MH17 coverage was a massive pure propaganda battle - no major media on either side voiced the true story (ie. the story compatible with all the related "before-the-fact" evidence). RT was doing bidding of its masters and trying to dismiss the truly obvious fact (confirmed by multiple "before-the-fact" evidence) that the rebels shot MH17 down mistaking it for Ukrainian military transport while the West media completely dismissed the fact that a bit more than 2 weeks before the MH17 the rebels captured an Ukrainian Buk launcher - that story [1] was widely publicized in Ukrainian and Russian media and confirmed by Ukrainian military at the time (i.e. "before-the-fact") - and doubled down instead on the unrealistic, yet politically very effective, theory of Russia transferring rebels a single Buk launcher "confirmed" only by the very bad grainy images surfacing only "after-the-fact" of MH17 shooting as well as dismissing various less direct evidence like the shrapnel type, related twitter posts made before-the-fact, etc.

[1] https://www.ng.ru/cis/2014-07-01/1_dnr.html ( i challenge you to find any mentioning of that story in West media :)