New Yorker Editor: Pro-Putin Anchors Are Russian Versions of Glenn Beck

David Remnick, on Tuesday’s Charlie Rose show, actually compared state-controlled Russian TV anchors to Glenn Beck. The editor of the New Yorker magazine told the PBS host that Vladimir Putin benefits from “a media that’s completely in the hands of the state” and then went on to liken pro-Putin anchors to the former conservative Fox News host and current CEO of The Blaze [1].

Remnick: “Imagine that Glenn Beck were in every anchor chair but he was appointed by the President of the United States. It’s, it’s that perverse. The sense of ‘they are out to get us’ is profound. And people who used to be on the margins, people who used to be on the kind of nutty margins of the discussion, have now been empowered to be on television, and are very forceful voices.”

The following take on the state of Russian media, by Remnick, was aired on the August 4 edition of PBS’s Charlie Rose show:

DAVID REMNICK, THE NEW YORKER, EDITOR: I made it my business on my last trip there, a few weeks ago, to not talk to the usual cast of liberal characters who speak English and all this but rather people who are either around Putin, who are either true believers or even more so. Part of what this new ideology, this kind of Eurasianist, nationalist - some of this contradicts - but this, this new fervor. It’s enforced by a media that’s completely in the hands of the state. The rhetoric that you hear on television in particular, would frighten the hell out of you if you heard it.

Imagine that - I’ve used this analogy have before but I think it’s apt. Imagine that Glenn Beck were in every anchor chair but he was appointed by the President of the United States. It’s, it’s that perverse. The sense of “they are out to get us” is profound. And people who used to be on the margins, people who used to be on the kind of nutty margins of the discussion, have now been empowered to be on television, and are very forceful voices. They go farther than Putin, and in a sense, they allow Putin to not only have his view amplified and amped up but for Putin to point to those guys and say, you know “I’m the reasonable one, compared to them.”