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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

My Adventures With RT

In 2015, Putin's flacks mistakenly brought me to Moscow to celebrate
Russia Today. It didn't quite work out the way they'd intended.

Given the prominence of Russia Today (RT), the Trump-loving Russian
state television now peddling Putin's propaganda
about
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I've got a story that suddenly feels
relevant.

In December 2015, I was invited by a man named David McCormack, whose
title was "Account Director, Ogilvy Media Influence for Ogilvy Public
Relations," to go to Moscow in order to attend a conference celebrating
RT's tenth anniversary. This was the occasion at which RT famously
paid Michael Flynn $45,000 to speak
.
I had never paid attention to RT before, and while I knew that Flynn had
occupied important roles in the U.S. national-security bureaucracy, I
was not yet up to speed on his role with Trump, whom I still had trouble
taking seriously. I do, however, recall being shocked at how crazy Flynn
sounded, especially on the topic of Hillary Clinton. Frequent RT guest
and Flynn's fellow conspiracy theorist Max Blumenthal
was also a
paid speaker, as was the British cheerleader for Hamas
and Saddam Hussein
George Galloway. Julian Assange
appeared by video. Green Party presidential candidate and 2016 election
spoiler Jill Stein
,
who appears in the famous photo at dinner with Flynn and Putin, spoke as
well. The word "shitshow" repeatedly came to mind.

RT/Ogilvy flew in a smattering of other journalists from all over the
world for the occasion. A reporter who kept an eye on such things during
the Trump administration recently emailed me to say that of all the
people who had been brought in to the conference, I was perhaps the only
one who did not come back and write nice things about Russia and RT. One
who did was a nice fellow I met named Patrick Lawrence, who used to call
himself Patrick L. Smith, and who told me he frequently appeared as an
analyst on RT. He later wrote a series of Russia-friendly articles for
The Nation, including the one discussed here
.
(I see he noted in September of last year that "It is the U.S. that has
assiduously sought to kindle Cold War II, just as it, and not the Soviet
Union, was responsible for starting Cold War I
.")

Mr. McCormack had apparently failed to do his homework and imagined
that, as a longtime columnist for The Nation, I, like Lawrence, would
likely be sympathetic to RT's mission and write the kind of article
that would justify whatever they were charging their client for my
business class airfare and fancy hotel room. Had I written about it, I
would have made all this clear, but my former professor Benedict
Anderson had died that week, and that gave me a great reason to write
about this "gentleman and scholar
"
rather than all the ridiculous crap I heard from the collection of
miscreants assembled by RT. When McCormick called to ask where my column
was, I let him know of my decision and reminded him that I had never
agreed to write about the conference and had not involved the magazine
at all in my decision to go. He became quite upset, and so I offered to
write up the conference for The Huffington Post but noted that I would
feel duty bound to describe it as simultaneously stupid and malevolent.
After hearing this, McCormack wrote an angry letter to The Nation in
which he told a story about me that is actually pretty funny if you know
the truth.

Though he was not in Moscow for the conference, McCormack insisted in
his letter that I had "hound[ed] a much younger female member of the
Ogilvy team working at the event. In addition, the RT communications
team voiced their frustration that Alterman was a disinterested attendee
who seemed to have no interest in engaging with the event he had been
invited to attend. In fact my colleagues in London have a 'love
letter' penned by Alterman to the young woman when he was supposedly
interviewing RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan. In addition to his
unprofessional behavior at the event, Mr Alterman has also declined to
write anything about RT or the trip since his return."

I can speak today to the details in his comically inaccurate charges,
because I saved my response to his email to The Nation. (I responded
even though, as I said, I didn't go there as a representative of the
magazine and it was really none of their business. I mean, if The Nation
were to start policing the behavior of its columnists out in the world,
it really should have started with Hitchens

and Cockburn
.)
Anyway, I explained back then:

The Ogilvy staff (mostly young women) informed me that even though I did
not request an interview, Margarita had told them that she really wanted
to be interviewed by me. I told them, I didn't need to interview her.
They asked me to pretend to do an interview to make her happy. One of
the women-the same woman who had called me at two in the morning in my
hotel room the night before for some reason and with whom I had a
friendly, joking relationship-gave me her notebook and a pen so that
it would look like I was doing a real interview with Margarite. During
the interview, while pretending to take notes-again, as a favor to
them-I wrote a jokey love letter in her notes asking her to marry me.
We never talked about it afterward and there could be no question in
anyone's mind that it was a joke.

That was the alleged "love letter." I did not answer the phone at 2:00
a.m. as I was asleep at the time and so I will never know if the woman
in question was part of a kompromat

plot of the kind that Putin may or may not have executed with Donald
Trump. (I doubt it, she seemed like a nice, ambitious young person,
trying to do good work for an evil client and not at all a film
noir-style femme fatale.) After the conference was over, I paid for an
extra night in the hotel and the Ogilvy staff took me out that night. We
had a lovely time, eating, drinking, and posing together for silly
selfies. And as far as I was concerned, that was that.

My only other contact with RT came sometime in 2017, when I agreed to go
on in exchange for $200 and a ride to Brooklyn College. I was to talk
about the media, but having still never watched RT, I did not know
enough about its broadcast to know that everyone else they booked that
day would be an insane person. Among the craziest-though it was quite
a contest-was "Lionel" a journeyman DJ and soon-to-be QAnon fanatic
whom Donald Trump later hosted at the White House
.
Turns out you can watch it here . It's
pretty funny today.

Anyway, as for RT itself, The Washington Post's Paul Farhi noted

that "According to the network itself,
it is available on just two
cable systems, out of about 5,200 across the country. It is also carried
on Roku, and the Dish and DirecTV satellite services. RT appears to be
somewhat more successful in spreading its message via digital
platforms-in part because its posts on Facebook, TikTok and other
platforms are amplified by right-wing American commentary organizations,
such as Breitbart and Infowars." After Farhi's piece ran and
Russia's attack on Ukraine expanded, however, RT was banned by the EU

and across the U.K
. and is now
blocked by YouTube
, which had
been its most popular platform, as well as Facebook
and TikTok
.
So that's good news, and something to think about, perhaps, for Tucker
Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and their comrades in our own profoundly
polluted media ecosphere who so frequently sound as if they were taking
orders from the same guy who-ultimately-calls the shots at RT.

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This week begins the annual "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema
,"
at Lincoln Center, and a happy occasion it is indeed. I was actually
sitting in LC's Walter Reade Theater two years ago, on the afternoon
of March 12, 2020, when it was announced that all further showings would
be canceled, and like everybody else, I did not go anywhere for anything
for a long time.

The movies confirm my belief that France is a far less silly country
than ours. Instead of moronic dreck like Emily in Paris, you get a
lovely little film like Les Amours d'Anaïs (Anaïs in Love). In this
film, while struggling to complete her thesis, thirtysomething Anaïs
has affairs with both a middle-aged publisher and then with his wife,
all the while leading a believably full and rich life that is always
just this side of out of control. The whole thing is a delight, and not
for one moment does it insult one's intelligence.

I also saw Tromperie (Deception), Arnaud Desplechin's interpretation
of Philip Roth's novel of the same name. I think movies should be
judged as movies and not compared to the books upon which they are
based, but this was a better film than Roth's book is a book. It's
the best cinematic interpretation of a Roth book since the 1969 classic
Goodbye, Columbus, which helped launch Hollywood's brief "Jew Wave."
The film is filled with fantastic female performances, and the idea of
putting Roth on literal trial for his alleged crimes against women is
funny, although, unlike the rest of the film, not terribly well
executed. If, like me, you have spent much of your life wishing your
country could be a lot, or even a little, more like France, the movies
in this festival will do nothing to disabuse you.

Music next week. Sorry.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Last night, the story broke

that RT America was stopping production and laying off its staff. This
column was written before that story became public.

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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