Hello everyone, I thought that today I'd make a long post for a change because I wanted to talk about one of my favorite videos of all time. It's entirely in Russian and it's called "Anatomy of REN-TV: Territory of Obscurantism". It details a scientific journalist's visit to a pseudoscientific TV network and I believe it has one of the greatest unaired interviews of all time. If you know Russian, I highly recommend you watch it, but if you don't, this post should hopefully catch you up to speed.
First, some context. РЕН-ТВ (REN-TV) is basically the russian equivalent of The History Channel, except somehow with even less actual history. Pyramid conspiracies, UFO sightings and Atlantis searches galore. It's basically the butt of Russian jokes about pseudoscience. This isn't related to the story but 2 years ago they tried to pass off that ai image of a bird with massive hairy balls as an actual species that exists in Madagascar. This should hopefully speak to the quality of their programming.
The story begins when our hero, scientific journalist Alexander Sokolov gets an invitation to be a guest expert on some REN-TV show. Now, non-quack scientists typically avoid going on REN-TV, as the editors there have a bad habit of splicing up things they said so that it looks like they support whatever pseudoscientific narrative the show they appear on is trying to push. However, just for fun, ignoring the colleagues urging him to reconsider, Sokolov decides to go.
The show Sokolov went on, "Territory of Misconceptions", sent him a list of interview topics so he could prepare beforehand. The topics were all long-debunked pseudoscientific myths about certain archeological finds, including but not limited to a skull of allegedly alien origins (spoilers: it's just a slightly broken cow skull) and carvings of tanks allegedly found in the pyramids of Giza. Mind you, the episode is supposed to be about evolution, which is a discrepancy Sokolov made sure to point out to the interviewer.
In order to prevent his speech from being edited in malicious ways, Sokolov utilized several tricks:
He spoke fast, using short sentences, with minimal pausing and maximum gesturing
When talking about a false claim he is debunking, he added in "allegedly" between every other word, as well as do liberal air quotes with his hands.
Last but not least, he took his own camera into the studio, which is how he ultimately got the recording for the video.
As the interview went on, Sokolov very efficiently went through and gave an actual explanation to every allegedly unexplainable by science claim presented, to the visible disappointment of the interviewer. After one of the interview questions claimed that humans walking on two legs made no sense from an evolutionary standpoint, Sokolov asked the interviever (who also was one of the writers) a question that lead to this interaction:
Sokolov: You're making this programme on the topic of biology, so I assume you've done some research beforehand.
S: What books on biology have you read in the past year?
I (audibly angrier): Let's discuss this backstage later
Near the end of the interview, after answering all the questions, Sokolov kinda goes off on the interviewer. He talks about how the broader scientific community has essentially boycotted the network due to their shady practices and how airing a constant stream of pseudoscientific slop does tangibly erode the public's trust in science. In the middle of this, the interviewer presumably takes a shot of truth serum and explains exactly how the network operates. This is an exact translation of that moment:
I: We are looking for people who support our ideas. You didn't support them, so we won't air you. Why would you come here just to debunk all of our words?
S: I come here not to debunk, I come here to carry the light of science.
I: Well, on REN-TV we do not carry the light of science, as you probably understand.
That last quote is easily the most iconic part of the interview. It's very rare that you see actors of pseudoscience be this up front and honest about what they're doing. It's worth noting that Sokolov never blames the interviewer directly. He says that he believes most people working at REN-TV are ultimately decent people that sadly contribute to a bad cause. On that note, he leaves the studio with an expectation to never get invited to the network again.
This video is like 9 years old but I still come back to it like once a year, mostly because there really aren't a lot of other examples of pseudoscience being directly confronted like that. Hopefully I recapped it well enough here, because I really do want more people to know about it.
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