For the employees who swiped into the second-floor office in downtown Washington, a few blocks from the White House, RT America offered good pay and benefits in the fiercely competitive cable news job market.
For the employees who swiped into the second-floor office in downtown Washington, a few blocks from the White House, RT America offered good pay and benefits in the fiercely competitive cable news job market. In the week since the network shut down, RT America’s on-air talent has been publicly defending the network.
Staff members were interested in holding up a mirror to dysfunction in the United States, a country where divides were only deepening. No one at RT in Moscow prodded them to do differently. Presumably that was the subject they were interested in, too. The person in charge was a tall and ginger-bearded veteran of Russian state-backed news, Mikhail Solodovnikov, who went by Misha. He ran the company through T&R Productions, a limited liability corporation, which declared in a 2017 Foreign Agents Registration Act filing to the Justice Department that he was the sole member and general manager and that he handled duties both as chief executive and head of editorial.
RT America generally portrayed the events differently from American news outlets. A former anchor, Liz Wahl, said her news director had told her not to use the word “invasion” and to refer to Russian soldiers as “peacekeepers.” The network was expanding, and Solodovnikov sought bigger names. He went to Princeton, New Jersey, to meet with Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, to pitch the idea of starting a show.
Hedges described the media’s portrayal of Russia’s interference in that election as “lazy” and was scathing about an intelligence report that concluded the Kremlin had used RT America as a “tool to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel protest.” In 2017, his show was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding informative talk show, RT America’s first major award nomination. He lost to Steve Harvey’s show “Steve.
The new scrutiny on RT America didn’t deter Blevins, a 2017 graduate of Texas Tech University. Blevins grew up in Mineral Wells, a town west of Dallas with a population of 16,000. She studied journalism in college, and her father, a postal worker, got hooked on independent radio shows and encouraged his daughter to seek alternative media voices.