BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Since the election, the American media have been following the so-called “Russia affair” with near obsession. Every step taken by Russia’s Ambassador Sergey Kislyak tracked, every Russian a potential Kremlin agent, every move by Putin a strategic play in the great game. Since the recent meeting between Trump and Putin, there have been a slew of memes referencing the Netflix drama, House of Cards. In that series, Russian President Viktor Petrov gives off an unmistakable whiff of Russian dominance.

[CLIP]:

VIKTOR PETROV:  Have you ever been in, um, a Lada?

FRANCIS UNDERWOOD:  Lada, no, I haven't.

VIKTOR PETROV:  No? Oh, it's the worst car ever built. A tiny little thing, yeah. Your head would hit the ceiling when you hit a pothole. It, it was a coffin on wheels. But then, after the fall, we got the Lexus….so much room. First time I [BEEP] my ex-wife? In a Lexus.

[FRANK LAUGHS]

You could never do that in a Lada, eh, no space, huh?

[PETROV LAUGHS, THEN BECOMES SERIOUS]

You see, Mr. President, I want the Lexus and you're trying to sell me a Lada.

[END CLIP]

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  And that is exactly how Putin wants to present himself and that’s how he wants to see himself, but that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that it’s true.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Alexey Kovalev created the Russian website, The Noodle Remover, to expose the cock and bull in Russia’s state media. But lately he sees some disturbing parallels in the American press, an abundance of stories that so aggrandize Putin that a staffer at the propagandistic Russia Today called it “Christmas in July.”

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Putin is not a strategist. He is, at best, a very skilled politician but his entire domestic and foreign policy is very reactive. The best he can do in reacting to challenges put in front of him is punishing Russians for something the American leaders have done, as retaliation for a bill passed by the US Congress.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Putin responded by restricting the American adoption of Russian children. This was to strike a blow against Americans. You say it's really striking a blow against Russians.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Yeah. There’s a Russian expression coming from the early Revolution years, to strike your own, to instill fear in your enemies.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Someone bullies you and you turn around and you smack your sister in the face.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Yeah, exactly. Putin, himself, in his administration and his propaganda machine, are, at their core, extremely insecure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Why? It seems that they’re highly capable of disrupting democracies all around the world.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  No, that’s really not the case [LAUGHS] because they are only able of disrupting democracies that are next door to Russia and that have a sizable Russian population, where they can claim they are protecting the interests of the ethnic Russians. You have this assumption that Putin has some sort of universally effective army of trolls and hackers and propagandists. But if you look at what we see on the ground in Russia, why doesn’t Putin ever employ this universally effective army of hackers and trolls in his own hometown of St. Petersburg?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  I just assumed he did.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Well, he did try to but both him and his party have consistently failed to secure a landslide victory in his own hometown.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Okay, so this Underwood meme that I opened with offers, you think, the classic American view of Putin and sort of lays out exactly what's wrong with the American view.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  The thing is that the sexual image of Putin gives him far too much credit. He doesn’t even have that much influence at home. When they tried to fix the elections last time, there were historically biggest protests on the streets of Moscow and all the major Russian cities.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Are you saying the polls are rigged too, that say that a HUGE majority of Russians across the country support him?

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Russia has three major pollsters. Two are state owned. There is also another pollster, also owned – actually, by Putin’s own security apparatus, to report back to Putin what people really think about him.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Do we know what his own private security pollsters actually say?

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  No, because nobody has access to those figures.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Can you tell me what some of the bad habits are of the American press that you've noticed when covering Putin?

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  You have these really persisting tropes, which are really misleading, like labeling any Russian diplomat or a journalist for a state-funded publication as some sort of subversive agents in the United States.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Most people who work for state-owned businesses or work in Russian embassies, aren't they extensions of the Russian government?

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Not at all. This is the problem. I know a lot of people in DC bureaus working for the Russian state publications and they’re extremely professional and sound journalists. There is a very limited number of people who can be described as Putin-linked –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  - maybe a couple of dozen people who used to be in the same judo club.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So an – another trope you’ve talked about is the obsessive tracking of Kislyak.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  If you look up the former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, you will find all the coverage on how he used to be persistently harassed by the Kremlin.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Yeah, Michael McFaul, who was Obama’s Ambassador to Russia was accused of virtually every bad thing that happened in Russia in that period.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  And that is exactly what is happening to the Russian Ambassador to the United States.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  You’ve also suggested that the American media are very focused on connecting the dots between various Russia-connected elements in order to create an ironclad conspiracy.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Yes, and that is a very Putin thing to do, to blame your failures on external malicious force. This is exactly what Putin, himself, did in 2011 when he blamed the mass protests on Hillary Clinton’s interference in Russian elections.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  It’s interesting, you’ve suggested that this coverage that overplays Putin’s strategic malevolence and all of that really plays into Putin’s own desires to be praised.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Well, domestically, at least, very much so. And what I’m seeing here in Moscow, and I’m watching the Russian state media all the time, is that Putin really has the resurgence on the state media as this massively influential world leader.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And didn’t Putin actually hire a PR firm with the goal of getting a positive op-ed in The Times?

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  Yes, Putin’s office hired a K Street firm, Ketchum, to whitewash his image. They did place an op-ed signed by Vladimir Putin in The New York Times, the Guardian and the Huffington Post, of all places. “Look at our wise dear leader who is so influential that The New York Times publishes his op-eds.”

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But, you know, this week the kind of op-eds we've seen, not by Putin, suggests that he is incredibly strong. One is called “Putin Meets His Progeny.” It doesn't seem as if he has to pay for the kind of PR that suggests he's very powerful.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  This whole notion of Putin being so incredibly, almost magically, prescient, that he somehow, back in 2015, way before the Donald Trump announced his run for the president, invested all the time and effort and strategy into electing Donald Trump as this Russian puppet president of the United States. Nnn-no! [LAUGHS]

Everything I’ve learned about my own country after one and a half decade of covering it tells me that Putin is really not the 3D chess grandmaster strategist that he is portrayed to be in the American media. And it doesn’t do anyone any good by portraying him as he wants to be seen.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Alexey, thank you very much.

ALEXEY KOVALEV:  You’re welcome, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Alexey Kovalev, formerly news editor for the Moscow Times, is also founder and editor of the website, The Noodle Remover.

BOB GARFIELD:  Coming up, another story about a fraud, fictitious voter fraud, and the commission created to prove it exists.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is On the Media.