Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik via AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, with retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and other guests attend a gala marking the tenth anniversary of the RT television network, December 10, 2015, in Moscow.
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.
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.
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.
