| CrossTalk | |
|---|---|
Title card
| |
| Presented by | Peter Lavelle |
| Production | |
| Production location | Moscow |
| Running time | 30 minutes |
| Original release | |
| Network | RT |
| Release | September 30, 2009 (2009-09-30) – present (present) |
CrossTalk is a current affairs debate television program on RT. It is billed by RT as "RT's flagship program."[1] It is hosted by American journalist Peter Lavelle, who created the show.[2] It also features Yelena Khanga.[3] CrossTalk premiered on September 30, 2009 and airs for 30 minutes.[4] Guests are encouraged to intervene whenever they wish which, according to Oliver Bullough in the New Statesman, means the conversation can "degrade into barely comprehensible shouting".[5]
In a 2010 episode of CrossTalk, Lavelle's two guests — Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion and Anne-Elisabeth Moutet of the Rousseau Institute — were taken aback when he said that the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks were "not fundamentalists".[6] Lavelle later said this particular episode was a "fiasco" because he lacked a "balanced pair of experts".[6]
An edition in July 2016 was a response to a NATO summit in which all participants were critical of the alliance. One participant said NATO was "a minute group of megalomaniac powerbrokers hell bent on sending us into a third world war". According to Lavelle, he had been prevented from showing a defence of NATO in captions because of technical problems, although anti-NATO captions were shown.[2] The programme has conveyed conspiracy theories that the September 11 attacks were an inside job and AIDS being caused by AIDS drugs themselves.[7]
