RT behaves like any modern state TV channel in my view -- obviously they are not going to go blatantly against a pronounced state decision but they certainly report critically from Russia, including on government affairs, and I'm sure they'd have debate programs where everybody can say what they have to say. I think that took place for the last 5 years of the Soviet Union as well, so I don't know what you are comparing with.
When I was in the USSR, I worked for State TV (Lenteleradiokomitet) and had friends working at TASS, and I was really not impressed with their objectivity although I could see improvements. When press is censored for so long, objectivity is almost impossible because reporters are afraid to deviate from the party line. They were starting to head in that direction, but there was still a sense that true objectivity was only just beginning to evolve.

RT - in my opinion - is quite objective and that was the point I was trying to make by posting about its coverage on what is probably the most controversial subject I could think of in Russia at the moment. Certainly they made every effort to include the side of the protesters, and they did not cover up the actual violence which has been going on:

Official statistics show that there were 12 homophobic attacks last year, though activists at Moscow’s sociological NGO Sova Center says that these numbers are almost meaningless, as assaults are rarely reported, and almost never recorded as hate crime incidents.

A 23-year old was murdered in Volgograd in May when he came out to a group of drinking partners during a celebration. The group proceeded to stuff beer bottles into the man’s anus, cut off his penis and then smashed his head with a rock.

On Friday, a resident of Voronezh city was sentenced to two months of corrective labor after being convicted of assaulting Pavel Lebedev, a member of a picket against the law banning the promotion of homosexuality. The judge found the young man guilty of kicking Lebedev in the stomach during the January 20 picket.

Gay activists claim there has been a sharp spike in violence against homosexuals in the past few weeks, saying that the new law gives homophobic gangs carte blanche to attack conspicuously-gay individuals, in the name of “upholding the law”. But exact numbers are impossible to collect reliably.
As far as modern state TV goes, I would even go so far as to say it is more balanced than corporate-sponsored journalism - provided it exists in a country where the journalists are not being constantly threatened and intimidated. Once that happens, it loses credibility.

The majority of corporate-sponsored journalism lacks true objectivity these days which is one of the reasons I got out of the field after being a television reporter for more than a decade and working as a journalist for 15 years.

In the United States, there was a massive scandal in the mid 2000's when a pair of reporters at FOX news tried to report the truth about Monsanto and were shut down. The government even passed laws making it perfectly legal for news media to LIE on TV, which was previously not allowed.

Monsanto Forced Fox TV to Censor Coverage of Dangerous Milk Drug | Institute for Responsible Technology |

We also lost our "fairness in broadcasting act" some years previously, which prevented such a limited number of corporations from owning ALL existing media outlets. Currently we have in the US what amounts to a corporate monopoly on national network news.

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/pelosi...ness-doctrine/

In my personal experience as a reporter, I myself was censored. One time, I did an expose on a car dealership which was selling car alarms that did not work. I had the guy admitting to it on camera. But that story never saw air because the car company contacted the TV station's general manager and threatened to pull their $100,000 advertising account. The General Manager came down to the newsroom and made an announcement that the story would not run, because he could not afford to lose what was effectively a large portion of our newsroom's operating budget at the time. That was just a local story. At the network level, this happens to a degree that I doubt most Americans even realize. Massive advertisement budgets, billions of dollars, are what run corporate news programs and this is why the corporations are not exposed by the mainstream media.

As much as Americans fear "state controlled TV," they seem largely unaware of how much control corporations exert over newsmedia. The scope and scale of it is immense. Yet many Americans continue to believe that "liberals" control our press, which is really no longer the case.

Corporate-run media also fails to properly investigate stories, since the focus is really on ratings and coverage is more about entertaining people, doing nonstop LIVE coverage even when it isn't necessary, so that reporters do not have the time to properly investigate their stories or follow-up on what they are reporting. Political press conferences turn into a dog-and-pony show where reporters may as well just read the press releases verbatim, since they rarely ask more probing questions.