OANN Reporter Wrote for Kremlin-Owned Sputnik
The Claim
Former OANN Reporter Kristian Rouz also wrote for the Kremlin-owned Sputnik news agency.
News posted on
Emerging story
Originally posted by Kyle Griffin on Twitter, The Daily Beast claims that OANN reporter Kristian Rouz is a Russian national who also writes for Kremlin-owned Sputnik.
The Tweet has since garnered over 24K retweets.
According to President Donald Trump himself, he watches the One America News Network (OANN). He encountered a lot of pushback when he peddled a OANN conspiracy theory in June 2020 suggesting that a 75 year old man who was pushed to the ground by police in Buffalo and had his head cracked open “could be an ANTIFA provocateur.” The OANN reporter referenced in the story appears to be Kristian Rouz.
Twitter users reacted to this news with many implying that Putin is outsmarting Trump and that Trump “continues to take the word of foreigners over the word of US security, expert advisors, and even media.”
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation discovered that this claim is true.
We searched the Sputnik website for articles written by Kristian Rouz and found there are many articles written by him. It appears his last article written for Sputnik was published July 22, 2019.
Sputnik News is in fact funded by the Russian Government through the RT News Agency. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Sputnik is thought to be involved in election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In 2019, OANN sued Rachel Maddow for claiming that Rouz was part of a Russian propaganda machine. It was dismissed by a judge but refiled in June 2020.
While Rouz did work for OANN for some time, his name and reporting have since been scrubbed from OANN’s website.
