People: Shatner angrily defends his new show.
William Shatner has spent the past two days lashing out at journalists and others blasting him for what one critic called his “Hanoi Jane” moment: Hosting a new talk show on the Kremlin’s state-funded network, RT.
The 90-year-old TV legend, who played heroic Captain Kirk in the “Star Trek” TV and film franchise, announced this week that his new general talk show, “I Don’t Understand,” would debut this month on RT America.
The parent network is RT, formerly known as Russia Today. RT has long been dubbed an arm of the Kremlin “propaganda machine” by experts across the world, including by U.S. intelligence agencies in 2017, according to the New York Post.
“This is your Hanoi Jane moment and despite best intentions, it’s not going to go well,” Steffan Watkins, a Canadian open source research consultant, replied to one of Shatner’s tweets about the show.
Watkins also tried to appeal to Shatner by saying he, too, attended the actor’s high school in his native Canada.
“We’ve walked the same stairs, and the same halls; please reconsider the RT thing,” Watkins said.
Shatner hit back at Watkins’ admonition with a GIF of “The Brady Bunch” character Marcia Brady saying “Sure, Jan,” with laughing emojis. Shatner seems especially incensed by criticism from Alexey Kovalev, an investigative editor for Meduza, one of the most popular independent Russianlanguage news outlets, the Daily Beast reported.
Kovalev issued a series of tweets that said that Shatner was being co-opted by RT, which would use his name and celebrity to “whitewash” some of its most “vile, racist” views, whether or not that was Shatner’s intention.
Shatner told Kovalev should first watch his show before he decides it’s propaganda and should refrain from judging him for what essentially is a distribution deal . Shatner continued his offensive against Kovalev, by calling him a “hypocrite” and saying that the journalist is “directly supporting the very regime you are berating me about” by choosing to live in Moscow.