Why are we surprised that a former AirAmerica host’s TV show carried on the Russian state-owned TV network?

Much to our surprise, former Air America host and left wing lunatic Thom Hartmann is a fan of IHateTheMedia.com. Well, that may be overstating it just a tad, but he is a fan of one particular IHTM story.

A couple weeks ago we did a story called The Encounter. It was a parody – a tale of an enhanced TSA pat down disguised as softcore porn.

The Encounter got picked up by a lot of other websites and got a lot of attention.

Rich Albeen, the guy who wrote it, is an old friend of the Editor. Rich was amused when he received his own story in an email from another friend. Then he was enraged when someone else was credited as its author at the bottom of that email. Rich’s son was so irked that he took it upon himself to send an email to or leave a comment on every site that carried it without crediting IHateTheMedia.com and his dad.

Now back to Thom Hartmann. Apparently he has a TV show. A writer for that show tracked down the author The Encounter and the following exchange of emails took place:

From: Sam Sacks
To: Rich Albeen
Sent: Tue, December 21, 2010 3:41:33 PM
Subject: TSA Romance novel

Hi Mr. Albeen –

I’m a writer for the Big Picture with Thom Hartmann – a TV Show on RT America.

I’ve been trying to track the origin of this piece:

“He grasped me firmly but gently just above my elbow and guided me into a room, his room. Then he quietly shut the door and we were alone…”

And it seems like it traces back to a post your (sic) wrote on IHateMedia.com back in November – is that correct? Or did you get it from someone else as well?Any info would be great.

Thanks,

Sam Sacks

From: Richard Albeen
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2010 8:03 PM
To: Sam Sacks
Subject: Re: TSA Romance novel

Sam,
I wrote the piece, originally titled The Encounter, for my friend … who owns and runs the website www.ihatethemedia.com.

The piece appeared in November.

(The Editor) and I have been friends for years. I’m a professional writer, and (he) asked me to do a piece on the current spate of TSA complaints for his satiric, parody-ish site. I agreed. It was fun.

I never knew it would have the impact that it evidently has. So, in short, I wrote the piece, it was entertaining, and the rest is, well, as you know.

Does this help?

From: Sam Sacks
To: Richard Albeen
Sent: Tue, December 21, 2010 5:34:18 PM
Subject: RE: TSA Romance novel

That’s helps a lot Rich – we really got a kick out of it over here and are thinking about using it in a piece on the show…just wanted to give credit to whoever originally wrote – you.

So thanks for the info.

-Sam

Here’s what Thom Hartmann’s The Big Picture program did with our story. We appreciate the newly-shorn Hartmann’s outstanding reading (he had just the proper degree of quiver in his voice) and the finely-acted final scene. Of course, it would have been nice if he had actually mentioned IHateTheMedia.com, but you can’t win ’em all.

We’re hit whores here at IHateTheMedia.com and we don’t care if Hartman’s a big lib. Our assumption is that almost anyone, regardless of political leanings, would find The Encounter funny. We’d love to have his lefty viewers come over here and leave their loony comments.

But we did wonder about Thom Hartmann’s TV show. We’d never heard of The Big Picture nor a television network called RT America, so we went to the website indicated on Sam Sacks’ email.

rttvamerica.com immediately refers over to another site, rt.com.

RT.com seemed to have a lot of Russian content, so we went to the bottom of the homepage where we found a copyright that said, “TV-Novosti.”

We googled TV-Novosti and found out that it is the Russian state-owned news agency. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

Russian International News Agency (RIA Novosti) is a Russian state-owned news agency based in the capital Moscow.

… By a decree of USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, “On the Establishment of the Information Agency Novosti,” the Information Agency Novosti (IAN) succeeded APN on July 27, 1990. “To provide information support for the USSR’s state domestic and foreign policies and proceeding from the interests of the democratization of the mass media,” the Novosti Press Agency was renamed the Information Agency Novosti (IAN). IAN’s tasks remained the same – preparing and publishing printed, TV and radio materials in the USSR and abroad; studying public opinion on Soviet foreign and domestic policies in the USSR and abroad.”

So the question is, why does Thom Hartmann, an extreme liberal radio talk show host, do a TV show produced by the Russian state-owned network?

The guy’s radio show has about a dozen listeners on a good day, so we’re not surprised that no American TV network is willing to offer him his own show. (Sure, we know that Rachel Maddow came out of AirAmerica, but she had that lesbian thing working for her. Hartmann doesn’t have that advantage).

Call us naïve, but even though we know Hartmann is a lunatic lib, we’re still surprised that he would do a TV show for the Russians. Obviously, his political philosophy is aligned more closely to that of the leftist dictatorship than it is to that of the American people, but what the hey? Do they not even try to hide it anymore?

Only in America, we suppose, would a failed liberal talk show host be given a TV show on a TV network run by an enemy of America.

Soure: RTTVamerica.com, Wikipedia