The man running taxpayer-funded courses to protect schoolchildren from disinformation has made repeated appearances on Vladimir Putin’s propaganda channel.
Matteo Bergamini’s Shout Out UK organisation received a share of a £3million grant from London Mayor Sadiq Khan and has worked with over 50 councils to teach 30,000 youngsters to help ‘counter disinformation through political and media literacy’.
He boasts of having over 1,500 schools in the group’s network and that its clients have also included the Home Office, Department of Culture, the Greater London Authority and US State Department.
Mr Bergamini was made an MBE for Services to Charity, Social Enterprise and Education in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours.
And he has started an All-Party Parliamentary Group with several senior MPs and peers to ‘bring political and media literacy education’ to every young person in Britain.
But for three years after the full launch of his organisation, Mr Bergamini made multiple appearances on Kremlin backed RT – previously called Russian Today – which watchdogs eventually pulled in the UK after widespread accusations it was promoting lies and propaganda.
He described being ‘honoured’ to speak at the 2017 World Festival of Youth in Russia, which was branded a Kremlin soft power event and was also addressed by Putin.
Mr Bergamini appeared on RT on screen and online between 2015 and 2018, even after then hard left Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell had told Corbynite MPs not to appear on it following the sickening nerve agent attack by Russian agents in in Salisbury in March 2018.
In a September 2018 RT interview about then Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s ID card plan, he appeared on screen as the channel promoted its much-mocked interview with the two suspected state assassins as they explained unchallenged that they had been innocent tourist in Salisbury who approached dissident Sergei Skripal’s house by accident.
RT was later fined £200,000 by Ofcom in 2019 for breaching impartiality rules over its reporting of the Salisbury poisonings and the war in Syria.
In a 2017 RT appearance Mr Bergamini accused the New York Times and Wall Street Journal of launching a ‘witch hunt’ against RT after the US papers accused the station of posting ‘unreliable, misleading and highly partisan’ content fuelled by a close relationship with social media.
He said: ‘They couldn’t just accept that RT is doing well by providing people with [content] that people will watch… ‘[They] are just choking out accusations without any evidence…’
Mr Bergamini told the Mail that he wasn’t in control of RT’s editing of his comments and he believed criticism of the channel was warranted.
Mr Bergamini did not mention his multiple RT appearances when hosting a 53-minute-long Nato sponsored podcast recorded at the US Embassy in June 2023 warning about Russian state propaganda.
The podcast included an extensive section about RT ‘pumping out disinformation’ in which he interviewed a US academic who described how the channel had been spreading conspiracy theories since 2008 and was filled with ‘Kremlin friendly voices’.
RT was finally pulled from UK screens in March 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine when Ofcom revoked its licence and the European Union banned it for promoting ‘systematic information manipulation and disinformation by the Kremlin’.
Ofcom later ruled RT had breached impartiality rules 29 times over its coverage of the war.
Mr Bergamini started Shout Out UK as a student blog in 2011 to platform youth voices and it became a ‘fully fledged’ organisation in 2015 declaring its ‘mission to defend and amplify democracy’ by ensuring all citizens are ‘inoculated from disinformation and misinformation.’
On 23 March 2014, as Russia was in the final states of annexing Crimea, Shout Out UK’s official Twitter account posted a tweet saying: ‘Has Cameron and Obama’s attack on a democratic decision to join Russia by Crimea shown old signs of western imperialism?’
Mr Bergamini told the Mail the tweet should also have included a blog to an article voicing someone else’s opinion and that he ‘fully condemned’ the annexation.
Later that year the account was used to Tweet an event with state media Rossiga Novessya, RIA Novosti, a forerunner of the Sputnik news agency which has also since been banned in the UK by Ofcom. It urged anyone wanting to be a journalist with RIA Novosti? contact Shout Out UK.
Mr Bergamini, who has also made many appearances on other news channels, told the Mail that going on RT or speaking at an event did not ‘constitute an endorsement of its practices’, that Shout Out UK’s ‘major works with governments’ began after his RT appearances and he did not mention these in the Nato podcast because it was to ‘platform experts’ not give his ‘personal experience.’
The day after the Mail approached for comment he Tweeted an article on Shout Out UK’s website entitled ‘my experience with foreign state propaganda’ which also addressed most of the points we had put to him.
Mr Bergamini dated the article as four days prior to being contacted by the Mail – and later told us it had been written ‘some time ago’ – but repeatedly declined to confirm the date he had published it online.