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douxreviews · 5 years

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Gotham - ‘Penguin, Our Hero’ Review

Selina: "So this is the Dark Zone? They should call it the dull zone."

Gotham lately has put me in a very troubled position as a writer; 'Trespassers' last week left me with the sourest of aftertastes, and yet as eager as I was for the oncoming episodes to redeem the season's quality, I also knew that any misstep 'Penguin, Our Hero' took could shatter this eagerness like a cut-rate drinking glass.

And while I confess my enthusiasm now sports cracks and fractures along its glass circumference after my viewing of 'Penguin, Our Hero', because I'm a good sport, I feel it's important to stay as objective as possible, and give even the best of the bad lot its day in the sun.

Like 'Trespassers', this week's episode is also diverged entirely into two plots: Gordon and the GCPD work to protect Haven - the community of civilians taking refuge from the rest of the city's mayhem - from Oswald and his own goons, and Bruce and Selina go hunting for Jeremiah. Back in Season 4, 'One Bad Day' attempted to sell its own twist on The Killing Joke comic, albeit with Gotham swapping out Barbara Gordon for Selina. 'Penguin, Our Hero' quite neatly succeeds in the first half of its run by continuing its homage to Alan Moore's story, this time with the positions of Batman and James Gordon being replaced respectively by Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne; Selina's got the bloodlust bad for Jeremiah's head, yet Bruce insists that he and Selina pursue him by the books, so that Jeremiah may face true justice for what he has done. In my Season 1 reviews, I mentioned once that I never grow bored when Gotham creates scenes like this to remind us that Bruce and Selina come from entirely separate upbringings. What's more, Bruce now has wisdom, reasoning, and even a bit of experience to back his assertions to Selina that sending Jeremiah to Belize isn't in her best interests.

Expanding upon Bruce and Selina's story, they learn that they may have a chance of finding Jeremiah in the 'Dark Zone', a sector of territory where Jeremiah rules over those crazy enough to be inhabitants. The grisly deformities and almost-outlandish costumes (which are major nods to The Dark Knight Returns) were able to capture a small sense of what it was I was expecting to see when Gotham City became a no man's land. It's grisly, it's a little zany, and it absolutely gave off a sense that Bruce and Selina could be goners had they stepped into this territory uninformed and unprepared.

It's a tad odd for me hearing Selina remark on and on to Bruce about how she's changed, and how she's now a different person after taking Ivy's magical medicine last week; in fact, Selina is every bit as quippy, as acrobatic, and as badass as I remember her in her prime. Gotham's showrunners have been insistent this year that Selina will be making additional and gradual changes as she moves closer to her destiny as Catwoman, but I think they might be scratching at the bottom of the barrel if they really want to come through on that promise; Selina has the whip, she has the claws, she has the spandex, she's already the spitting image of Gotham City's infamous cat burglar. So I personally think Gotham can take a break from all this prattle about how much more Selina has to 'change' before she starts wearing cat-ears and making poorly timed feline-themed puns.

Meanwhile, Oswald discovers that most of his thugs and followers have defected to Haven to seek protection from the GCPD. So naturally, Oswald handles this 'betrayal' the way he handles everything - by overreacting. I suspect though that all Oswald really cared about was getting his bulldog Edward back from Haven, above anyone else. The fact that Gordon wouldn't even give the pooch up actually had me siding with Oswald for a majority of this episode. As always, Robin Lord Taylor's scene-chewing here is a delight and a half, even if he is still strangely lacking a shotgun-umbrella. And when it's evident that Oswald's goons have double-crossed him, he resorts to teaming up with Gordon to drive the gangsters out of Haven for good. Gotham seems to have forgotten already that an alliance seemed to be brewing between Gordon and Barbara last week, and so instead we get the first of hopefully many more team-ups between Gordon and Oswald. I also suspect this turn of events sets into motion a domino effect leading to the prelude we saw at the beginning of 'Year Zero' depicting Gordon, Bullock, Oswald and Nygma teaming up against an unknown army.

With the good set aside, now we must come to both the bad and, characterization-wise, the ugly. Specifically, it's one of my biggest gripes with Gotham in years. In regards to portrayal, I haven't seen Gotham so poorly deconstruct one of its most memorable rouges since the introduction of Victor Fries way back in Season 2. I'm talking about this series' rendition of Harley Quinn.

Harley Quinn is unique among Batman rouges because she actually made her debut way back when during the airing of Batman: The Animated Series. She was a character created exclusively for the cartoons before her fusing into mainstream comics, and mainly operated as the Joker's No. 2, though as the series continued, she was fleshed out even further, shown to have once been a psychiatrist that treated the Joker at Arkham Asylum, before ultimately becoming exploited and manipulated by the Joker to turn to a life of crime.

Alternatively, last year, Gotham introduced Ecco, a mysterious subordinate of Jeremiah Valeska who, quite frankly, followed him into battle unquestionably, and in this season, into no man's land as well. Gotham hasn't outright referred to her yet as 'Harley Quinn', but the use of her catchphrase 'Puddin' in this week's episode, as well as the colors of red and black scattered along her clothing is very much a dead giveaway.

Gotham has had difficulties in the past trying to incorporate their own iteration of Harley Quinn into the series. It's come out that there were plans at the end of Season 3 to turn Barbara Kean into the character. There were also rumors that the little girl Bruce saved in an alleyway, also at the end of Season 3, would also grow up to become Harley. To this day, I absolutely believe the inclusion of Harley Quinn isn't an essential factor to Gotham's gutsy, spunky narrative. Simply put, she's a character best saved for a day when the city actually has a properly established Joker (and Batman for that matter), but at best, shelving the character for another time would mean that we would get to be spared Gotham's rendition at...whatever Ecco is supposed to be. And whatever Gotham's intentions were for this character, they've managed to make Ecco everything Harley Quinn is not. Traditionally, Harley does not earn every reader/viewer's sympathy, but the character always steals the show whenever she shows up. She can be funny, she can be entertaining in her own demented methods, it's actually a little unsettling as the viewer to stay tuned with the character as she gets joy out of the most twisted and sadistic things. Even Margot Robbie's portrayal of the character in Suicide Squad remains a personal highlight for me in an otherwise hopeless film because though she brings her own attributes to the character, there are still plenty of homages written into her role that evoked a bit of nostalgia in me for that classic animated series.

Gotham's rendition of Harley Quinn by the end of it is tragically boring, but worse than that, Francesca Root-Dodson's performance fails to share any likeness either with the characteristics of Harley. She's more akin to a hype man (or hype woman in this case) for Jeremiah, much like how Ebony Maw was to Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, minus the chilling motion capture and dainty fingers. A week ago, I had a hope that Gotham could learn to better blend all of its characters into a single narrative this season, but now I'm left with a single and very potent desire outweighing all others, and that is that Ecco's appearance this week was a one-time occurrence only. Any further appearances down the winding road will all result in a dogged struggle to sit through her scenes, which felt like being stuck in a room with a Harley Quinn cosplayer whose only knowledge of the character comes from what Warner Brothers advertises on t-shirts.

Aaron Studer loves spending his time reading, writing and defending the existence of cryptids because they can’t do it themselves.

#Gotham #Bruce Wayne #Selina Kyle #Harley Quinn #James Gordon #DC Comics #Batman #Gotham Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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theantisocialcritic · 5 years

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This AntiSocial Life: Revenge of the Outsider

I’m furious today. I’m rarely ever mad but today I’m furious. In the light of the horrifying terrorist attack by an extremist in New Zealand that resulted in the death of 49 innocent people, I’m more furious than I’ve ever been in one of these public massacres. It’s easy to be cold and cynical and let the numbers pass by in the background at work while you move on with your daily life but today I’m stewing in my anger.

Christchurch, New Zealand

A monstrous white nationalist and self-described “eco-fascist” psychopath (and apparently three of his friends) sought to end the lives of dozens of innocent people and succeeded. What followed was the usual cavalcade of cynical bi-partisan political pandering. The side loosely affiliated with the attacker obfuscates any involvement and/or distances themselves from their actions. The other side begins pandering about how the violence proves their arguments right and tries to push legislation that goes nowhere. We’ve all seen this song and dance dozens of times at this point.

What became more frustrating in the hours that followed was the slow realization of just how bad things had gotten. Even beyond the horror that was the Australian Senator blaming Islamic immigration for the massacre, it quickly settled over the situation that the normal debate and bi-partisan dehumanization was something the shooter was actively seeking to perpetuate. In the shooter’s own manifesto he stated that the entire purpose of the shooting was to be as politically calculated as possible to spark mutual disdain and purposely accelerate reactions.

Beyond the obvious uncontionable violence he inflicted on an innocent house of worship, he did everything he could to make his event as infuriating as possible. He used weapons he knew would start firearms debates across the world. He namedropped contentious political and cultural figures like Candace Owns and Pewdiepie. At a time when the edgiest parts of the internet are hotly contested (in Europe, copyright laws are about to become so strict that they could effectively ban memes) he lined the weapons he used with memes just to draw attention to them. He did everything in his power to make sure his act of violence translated into vicious political discourse in a purposeful attempt to get contentious conversations about gun control and social media censorship rolling as a backdoor means of brewing hostility.

We’re at the point in discourse where vicious politics are so predictable that psychopaths can read the room enough to direct the outrage to purposely make discourse of difficult topics more broken. He actually thought he could go as far as to start a race war with his actions. Remember, the second bloodiest war in human history was caused by one man being assassinated. It could’ve worked. We’re already so far beyond the pale already that there’s hardly been any discussion of the actual people who were victimized in the massacre. Nobody cares about the dead and wounded beyond how useful they are as tools for political gain. Ask yourself, what did you hear first: the names of the victims or calls for a political response? For all the discussions of gun control, far right extremism, far left extremism, radical Islam, toxic masculinity, mental health reform, overzealous media coverage and hate speech that spins every time these events happen there’s never a truthful discourse about the most important things that matter. What is causing young men to actually become so nihilistic and disenfranchised in the first place?

The Revenge of the Outsider

I’m primarily a film writer but I do most of my writing for websites that primarily cover politics and religion. Outside of my Flawed Faith series, I very rarely talk about these issues outside of the venues in which I’m generally encouraged to do so. Simply put, I’m not a confrontational person and I don’t want to spend my entire life litigating contentious issues. My entire ethos as an entertainment writer and TV host has been that entertainment is the last bastion of shared culture in the modern world. There is a reason that films become hotly debated topics like Ghostbusters, The Last Jedi and Captain Marvel. People recognize the politicization of films is effective and either see it as useful or as innately divisive. Historically I’ve attempted to stay out of these conversations because they’ve seemed innately useless to me. Today however I need to make an exception.

Prior to today, I’d been deliberating a lot about the messages of a number of recent films. I’d been thinking of it ever since I saw The LEGO Movie 2 last month. That movie crystalized an interesting idea in my mind about the nature of villainy in recent popular films. There's an undercurrent of satire that covers a number of the most popular films of the past several years. In this movie, I finally understood it in the character of Rex Dangervest. Spoiler for The LEGO Movie 2 but it turns out that Rex Dangervest is an older version of Emmet who was lost for several years and decided to take revenge on his friends for abandoning him to suffer alone for years without hope of rescue. In order to do this, he foments hostility between The Man Upstair’s children to cause the LEGO equivalent of the apocalypse as retribution. With this character, I suddenly began to realize how much this story is repeated in recent films.

In Black Panther, we have a version of this with Killmonger, a man who was abandoned as a child by Wakanda after his father betrayed them and who was left alone to suffer in poverty now seeking his claim to the throne as a means of overthrowing the world and fomenting a worldwide revolution.

In Star Wars, we see this embodied in the character of Kylo Ren, a young man once destined to inherit the ways of the Jedi who was failed by every adult and institution in his life except for the leader of the First Order who offered him the opportunity to blow up the system that betrayed him. His most famous lines in the recent movies have all been variations of letting the past die. The moment the power reaches his hands and he takes control of the Imperial Death Cult, all he wants to do with it is reign destruction down on the Galaxy and destroy every institution before him.

Of course, the most famous example of this story is unquestionably The Dark Knight. In that film, the battle of the soul of Gotham City is literally played out by a battle of minds between symbols of order and chaos. It predicted the modern world of escalation and reactionary impulses that drive radical movements across the political spectrum. The Joker in that film doesn’t actually have a singular motivation for his impulse but that doesn’t matter in that film. He’s the embodiment of chaos, meant to call the hypocrisies of the world out as he sees them and create some semblance of equilibrium as he sees it.

It struck me just how frequently this kind of story pops up in modern fiction. What’s interesting in these stories is that at the end of the day, the heroes facing off against these villains ultimately come to the conclusion that society itself is at fault for the disenfranchisement of the villains. The order they perceived in the world was a lie that could only be set straight by ending the circumstances that gave the ideologies of each of these characters are very different, coming from identity, abandonment, oppression of the minority at the fringe of society, etc. What’s important is what they have in common. Regardless of the ideology of the viewer, there is a shared collective sense that society is fomenting the forces that seek to destroy it unintentionally. These characters all share a combined desire to destroy order and rule over the ruins.

Unfortunately, this is the very story we’re watching play out in Christchurch.

The Crisis of Modernity

There is a term used In Christian circles known as the “crisis of modernity”. It speaks to the notion that despite the entirety of humanity’s social, economic, technological and ethical progress that people still aren’t happy. There is a sense in the world that something is amiss in spite of the fact that there has never been a more prosperous and free time to be alive as a human than this very moment. As a result, young people specifically are seeking out meaning in alternative avenues. Most dull their senses in enormous amounts of food, drugs porn or video games to make their senses feel less lacking. In the case of the latter with video games, young men don’t seem to be seeking out relief from stress but an artificial form of challenge. Video games provide an artificial sense of completion and journey for young men to hone a set of skills and exercise them at their needs. The same is true of pornography. The only alternative to this is for young people to see out meaning in radical ideologies. People become so attached to their narratives that the thought of losing causes them to radicalize. We fear for an uncertain future so badly that we come to the conclusion that we must win by any means necessary. We compromise our values and punching down on innocent people. Then the other side reacts and does the same thing and the world spirals.

We see this crisis playing out in the zeitgeist across the world. It’s easy to write these anxieties off as toxic masculinity or unconscious bigotry but the problems go far deeper than mere anxiety or prejudice. There’s a more primeval issue at the core of modern life’s failures. People are unhappy. There is a reason why so many people resonate with these revenge of the outsider characters like Kylo Ren and Killmonger. People sense that the order of modern life is spiritually killing them. Modernity as we know it doesn’t feel normal to people. Modern life is unfulfilling and lacks meaning. It’s easy to become disenfranchised and look upon the greatest creations of man and find them wanting. At that point, what choice is there left but to burn the past? What choice is there but to accelerate political tensions to burn down the old corrupt order. In the Post-Christian world, where every ideology and institution from the church, to the government, the country, the family and even the individual has been so thoroughly deconstructed, laid bare and revealed corrupted, where is there left to find meaning in?

These characters, these real-life men exist and they’re looking out into the void and desperately aching to lash out and cause as much damage as possible. We talk so much about abuse and broken men but we rarely talk about where these men are coming from. To quote C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” We’ve raised generations of young people who have been gifted with the spoils of history and yet who lack the inner strength to enjoy them. These problems begin with how we raise our children. These problems begin with what we teach our children to believe about the world. The only solution to the crisis of modernity, the epidemic of mass shootings and the bifurcation of American life is to resolve the meaning crisis. Until then, expect the worse.

#christchurch #new zealand #kyle ren #star wars #black panther #revenge #disenfranchised #the joker #the dark knight #crisis of modernity #the lego movie 2

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mcsanders278 · 7 years

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Silent films vs Green Screen

I remember as a child seeing the first academy award winning best picture, Wings, in class at my elementary school around fifth grade. For those of you who are unaware, it is the only silent film to win best picture. Even at a young age the film left a lasting impression and was my first introduction into silent cinema. Admittedly, looking back on Wings now it is nowhere near one of the best silent pictures made but it will always have a sense of nostalgia for me.

Since that initial introduction to Wings my appreciation for silent cinema has waxed and waned over the years. I would be remiss to say that silent films don’t require a different level of dedication than sound pictures as it is essentially impossible to do anything else while viewing them. Foreign cinema is similar in nature but foreign films have always felt more accessible to me since there is at least some speaking element - even with a lack of understanding the language, hearing tonal shifts in voices and sound effects can still provide a relatively high level understanding of what is going on even if the viewer is not completely paying attention / engaged in the viewing process.

There is a large gap in memory between my viewing of Wings and my next silent film as my next cognizance of a silent movie was probably about eight years later in watching Buster Keaton in The General in a film history class. Oddly enough, as much as I considered myself a film connoisseur even at a young age taking the film history class made me realize that the earliest form of cinema had never been a format I completely delved into...I had never even seen a Charlie Chaplin film by the time I was in college (this could easily be viewed as cinematic blasphemy).

In my third year of college I spent a considerable amount of time in the school library due to having large chunks of time between my classes. It was here that I was introduced to more cinematic endeavors as there were multiple television stations with laserdisc players connected. Even then laserdiscs were a dead form of media but the library had an extensive collection of films, including F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Sunrise and numerous Criterion Collection films (this is a company which will undoubtedly come up in future posts).

Even with my love of Sunrise and The General, for some reason I still didn’t have a complete buy-in to devoting a great deal of my film viewing hours to the silent form. Fast forward another 10 years or so when my sons were of an age to appreciate something beyond Disney cartoons. The three of us gained an esteem for Charlie Chaplin and his visual genius pretty much at the same time. I wasn’t expecting them to have the patience to sit through a silent film but for those of you who have seen the comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, etc you are well aware that they have a someone animated quality in their presentation anyway, which is never boring.

For the next 8-10 years I was open to watching silent films on a regular basis; however, I essentially limited my exposure to comedies. There were a few dramatic films in between the comedies but nothing of mental consequence.

Fast forward yet again to a relatively recent screening of Fritz Lang’s restored version of Metropolis at the FilmBar in Phoenix. I had seen the film previously years ago but it was a very poor print converted to DVD. One thing I have realized over my film viewing years is that if I am screened a poor print of any film my attention span is already depleted to almost zero. Needless to say, the version screened at FilmBar was a newly restored version with scenes recently found and it was gorgeous. How they were able to make a 90 year old film look so pristine is beyond me / just shows how film itself is magical. The luxury of seeing Metropolis on a big screen and completely devoting myself to its genius in a theater was an insane experience.

Even if you haven’t seen Metropolis you have unquestionably seen some movie which was influenced by it as it was groundbreaking not only from a technical stance but also from a narrative stance.

I’m sure by now you’re asking how any of this has any relation to my topic / the current use of green screen in films. I’ll get to that in a moment. About 7 years ago I took my sons on the Universal Studios VIP tour which gave us a behind the scenes look at the movie-making process. During the tour we were actually taken into a sound stage which was green screen from floor to the top of the walls (see below)

At the time I thought this was a pretty cool but little did I know how green screen since then / over the past 5 or so years really has created a void in today’s cinema. If you think about the entire concept of green screen/CGI and what it asks of the viewer it is actually pretty weird...you know it is CGI, the filmmaker knows that you know it is CGI, yet you are supposed to pretend that it is real. Think about that for a moment...

One could say that it is just a souped up version of what Disney did years ago with films like Song of The South and Mary Poppins with the incorporation of animation on live action; however, the difference is that there is never a question that animation is involved with those earlier films and the viewer is not expected to think otherwise. Watching the film Tarzan a few years ago is when I fully realized my pure contempt for films which have predominant use of green screen as it was quite clear that probably more than 85% of a film which was supposed to take place in the jungle was filmed indoors / in a setting like the photo above. Again, think about that for a moment...

Getting back to silent films (and most notably films like Metropolis), the set designs and production values of a lot of silent films by the known silent directors of the time (Lang, Murnau, Chaplin, etc) were pretty insane. It is in seeing the ingenuity and care of films from almost 100 years ago compared to the somewhat frivolous approach to film-making nowadays where all of the big budget, big money-making movies are over run with CGI / green screen that one must wonder if we have taken a huge step backwards in cinema/imagination. We now seem to be at a point where viewers are desensitized and don’t care for good stories and good film-making, just “loud” productions. This isn’t to say that all movies nowadays are bad and that the use of green screen/CGI can’t be used for a good purpose (as long as it only adds to the story and doesn’t drive it) but if I were to have a choice between watching an amazing, emotionally engaging production like Metropolis or Murnau’s Faust versus a predominantly green screen production, which really has a cold, empty feeling to it, I would choose the silent film.

#filmbar #criterion collection

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Russia’s RT Network: Is It More BBC or K.G.B.?

By Steven Erlanger, NY Times, March 8, 2017

LONDON--The London newsroom and studios of RT, the television channel and website formerly known as Russia Today, are ultramodern and spacious, with spectacular views from the 16th floor overlooking the Thames and the London Eye. And, its London bureau chief, Nikolay A. Bogachikhin, jokes, “We overlook MI5 and we’re near MI6,” Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence agencies.

Mr. Bogachikhin was poking fun at the charge from Western governments, American and European, that RT is an agent of Kremlin policy and a tool directly used by President Vladimir V. Putin to undermine Western democracies--meddling in the recent American presidential election and, European security officials say, trying to do the same in the Netherlands, France and Germany, all of which vote later this year.

But the West is not laughing. Even as Russia insists that RT is just another global network like the BBC or France 24, albeit one offering “alternative views” to the Western-dominated news media, many Western countries regard RT as the slickly produced heart of a broad, often covert disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions and destabilize the West.

Western attention focused on RT when the Obama administration and United States intelligence agencies judged with “high confidence” in January that Mr. Putin had ordered a campaign to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” discredit Hillary Clinton through the hacking of Democratic Party internal emails and provide support for Donald J. Trump, who as a candidate said he wanted to improve relations with Russia.

The agencies issued a report saying the attack was carried out through the targeted use of real information, some open and some hacked, and the creation of false reports, or “fake news,” broadcast on state-funded news media like RT and its sibling, the internet news agency Sputnik. These reports were then amplified on social media, sometimes by computer “bots” that send out thousands of Facebook and Twitter messages.

Watching RT can be a dizzying experience. Hard news and top-notch graphics mix with interviews from all sorts of people: well known and obscure, left and right. They include favorites like Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Noam Chomsky, the liberal critic of Western policies; odd voices like the actress Pamela Anderson; and cranks who think Washington is the source of all evil in the world.

But if there is any unifying character to RT, it is a deep skepticism of Western and American narratives of the world and a fundamental defensiveness about Russia and Mr. Putin.

Analysts are sharply divided about the influence of RT. Pointing to its minuscule ratings numbers, many caution against overstating its impact. Yet focusing on ratings may miss the point, says Peter Pomerantsev, who wrote a book three years ago that described Russia’s use of television for propaganda. “Ratings aren’t the main thing for them,” he said. “These are campaigns for financial, political and media influence.”

Whatever its impact, RT is unquestionably a case study in the complexity of modern propaganda. It is both a slick modern television network, dressed up with great visuals and stylish presenters, and a content farm that helps feed the European far right. Viewers find it difficult to discern exactly what is journalism and what is propaganda, what may be “fake news” and what is real but presented with a strong slant.

A recent evening featured reports of Britain refusing to condemn human rights violations in Bahrain and a “mainstream media firestorm” over Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s chats with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Other reports included the “liberation” of Palmyra by the Syrian Army with “the support of the Russian Air Force;” an interview with former British ambassador to Syria and a United States critic, Peter Ford; and a report about a London professor decrying the fall in British living standards.

There are “clickbait” videos on RT’s website and stranger pieces, too, like one about a petition to ban the financier George Soros from America for supposedly trying to “destabilize” the country and “drown it” with immigrants for a “globalist goal.”

Mr. Bogachikhin and Anna Belkina, RT’s head of communications in Moscow, insist it is absurd to lump together RT’s effort to provide “alternative views to the mainstream media” with the phenomena of fake news and social media propaganda.

“There’s an hysteria about RT,” Ms. Belkina said. “RT becomes a shorthand for everything.”

For example, she says, while RT was featured heavily in the American intelligence report, it was largely in a seven-page annex (of a 13-page report) that was written more than four years ago, in December 2012, a fact revealed only in a footnote on Page 6.

She flatly denies any suggestion that RT seeks to meddle in democratic elections anywhere. “The kind of scrutiny we’re under--we check everything.”

For RT and its viewers, the outlet is a refreshing alternative to what they see as complacent Western elitism and neo-liberalism, representing what the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov recently called a “post-West world order.”

With its slogan, created by a Western ad agency, of “Question More,” RT is trying to fill a niche, Ms. Belkina said. “We want to complete the picture rather than add to the echo chamber of mainstream news; that’s how we find an audience.”

Nearly all the mainstream media came out against Mr. Trump during the campaign and much of the news coverage about him was negative, she said.

“This is why we exist,” Ms. Belkina said. “It’s important to watch RT to hear alternative voices. You might not agree with them, but it’s important to try to understand where they’re coming from and why.”

A French legislator, Nicolas Dhuicq, who has appeared on RT and went to Russian-annexed Crimea in 2015 as part of a delegation of French legislators, said that RT’s aim was “to make the voice of Russia heard, to make the Russian point of view on the world heard.”

Still, Mr. Dhuicq said, “the impact of RT, in my opinion, is very low.” He added: “There is enormous paranoia when we imagine that RT will change the face of the world, influence national or other elections.”

Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor who was the United States ambassador to Russia during the Obama years, said that RT should not be lightly dismissed. “There is a demand in certain countries for this alternative view, an appetite, and we arrogant Americans shouldn’t just think that no one cares.”

But there is a considerably darker view, too. For critics, RT and Sputnik are simply tools of a sophisticated Russian propaganda machine, created by the Kremlin to push its foreign policy, defend its aggression in Ukraine and undermine confidence in democracy, NATO and the world as we have known it.

Robert Pszczel, who ran NATO’s information office in Moscow and watches Russia and the western Balkans for NATO, said that RT and Sputnik were not meant for domestic consumption, unlike the BBC or CNN. Over time, he said, “It’s more about hard power and disinformation.”

The Kremlin doesn’t care “if you agree with Russian policy or think Putin is wonderful, so long as it does the job--you start having doubts, and of 10 outrageous points you take on one or two,” he said. “A bit of mud will always stick.”

Stefan Meister, who studies Russia and Central Europe for the German Council on Foreign Relations, agreed that “we shouldn’t overestimate RT. The main success of the Russians is the link to social media through bots and a network of different sources.” That network, he said, is “increasingly well organized, with more strategic and explicit links between sources and actors--Russian domestic media, troll factories, RT, people in social networks and maybe also the security services.”

“Open societies are very vulnerable,” Mr. Meister said, “and it’s cheaper than buying a new rocket.”

RT is part of the reality of the 21st century, Mr. Pomerantsev said. “Everyone will do it soon. It’s the world we have to live in.” Hacks and leaks are much more disruptive, he said. “If you can take out the electrical grid in Ukraine, that’s scary. It’s hard to get too scared about Larry King on RT.”

Mr. Pomerantsev agrees with Ms. Belkina that RT is not inventing popular mistrust about Western democracy. “The Russians are about sowing mistrust about institutions that is there already, feeding it,” he said. “How do we make our institutions more trustworthy?”

#Russia #RT #Russian media

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