Who Is This Deborah Armstrong And What Is Her Agenda?

Is she KGB? A Russian Bot? Kremlin Propagandist? Putin Puppet? You decide!

Photo of me in 1991, Leningrad. Taken by a reporter from Izvestia who did a story about the project I was involved with.

As of next month, I will have been writing about Russia, Ukraine, and the ongoing conflict for a full year. April 7th will mark the anniversary of my return to writing.

I’ve written more than 75 articles in that time. It’s not as many articles as I would have liked to have generated. But on the other hand, I often write lengthy articles and investigative reports, which take a great deal of time to research.

A number of you have pledged to support me on Substack (thank you!) and I’ve received messages from several of you asking if you could donate. So I decided that as of April 7th, I will open up some options for donations.

I promise here and now that I will never put up paywalls on my articles. They will always be free to read. But if you really want to help out, you can buy me a coffee or put something in my tip jar. Ultimately, I would love to make enough to live on. But at this time, I only have around 500 followers on Medium and Substack combined, so I’ll be happy if you guys can just buy me a coffee once in a while.

Most importantly, please share my work as much as you can. It’s important for as many people as possible to learn what is really going on with this conflict, which has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives according to some estimates. And it’s important to challenge establishment narratives wherever and whenever we can. I want to give people the side of the story they haven’t been hearing, so that they can make up their own minds about what’s going on in the world, rather than have their minds made up for them!

That’s my agenda in a nutshell.

Because I lived in Russia, speak some Russian and have connections there, I am in a good position to write about it. And because I have a background in news and journalism, I have the necessary skills. I must admit though, my trolls make me look so much more glamorous! Like some kind of secret agent straight out of a James Bond film — which is probably where they formed most of their opinions about Russia, judging from their “troll leavings.”

Sorry to disappoint everyone, but I’m really just a 57-year-old housewife who stays up all night researching and writing these articles while cuddling with her cats. My trolls seem to think that the Kremlin is paying me, but so far I haven’t received a single penny, nor a single kopek, so I guess “the check is in the mail”…?

Now, I did live in the Soviet Union in 1991–1992 (the USSR collapsed while I was there) as part of a joint-venture that I served on, along with another American and a couple from Australia. I’ve written about that before, but here is an article about it which was published in a church newspaper. That church, which I am no longer affiliated with, helped to fund the project.

That’s me on the far right side of the picture, back when they still called me “Debbie.” (cringe!) And there is plenty of proof that I’ve lived in the United States all of my life, excluding the nearly two years I was overseas. For example, all the TV news stories I’ve produced. I worked in three different markets in the Pacific Northwest during the 1990’s.

Here I am, interviewing Weird Al!

And here I am jumping out of an airplane!

Here I am spending a night in jail:

And, here’s a feature that I won an Emmy for in 2001.

The funniest part about the “Java Junkie” story, aside from the story itself — which is about a man who spends more money on lattes than some people spend on rent — is that I won that Emmy after I resigned from the TV station I was working at!

Workplace mobbing

I have mentioned this in passing on a couple of podcasts I was on recently. So I want to just get the story out once and for all. It’s not something I intend to bring up a lot, but it’s an important part of who I have become. Our struggles are part of who we are.

The last TV station I worked at, which I won’t mention by its call-letters because I don’t want to open up a Pandora’s box full of lawyers, was the most toxic place I have ever had the misfortune to be stuck at. Not everyone there was terrible, but sadly, most of them were. And the management was as toxic as it gets. TV news is a tough business even in the best of circumstances because the pressure is so intense! I was churning out three stories a day back then, sometimes more, and going live on the air constantly. Deadlines were dead serious!

I didn’t mind the pressure. But when you add a pack of narcissists and flying monkeys into the mix, it’s a lethal combination. Granted, I didn’t get the best start there. The newsroom was under new management and they had just cleaned house, letting go of some very popular and experienced reporters. My news director probably thought he was getting a bargain, hiring me so cheaply when I had more experience than the hires straight out of college, but my new colleagues hated me before they even met me, the way union workers hate “scabs.”

Photo: Good Reads.com

To make matters worse, I had a knack for pissing off the wrong people. I was always a free spirit, speaking my mind too quickly, or letting a joke rip without giving enough thought to who my “audience” was. One time, I made a stupid joke at the expense of the Queen Bee. She had been cherry-picked by the news director from a market where he had worked with her previously, and she was his Golden Child.

The very definition of a malignant narcissist.

To say the joke didn’t go over well would be an understatement. I apologized right away, of course, but no apology would have been enough for the Queen Bee. Before I even knew what was happening, the whole hive was attacking me. I was mocked and harassed relentlessly. There were death threats. My work was sabotaged. I was treated with disrespect and emotionally abused. It got so bad that sometimes at night, I checked the tires on my car to be sure they weren’t slashed.

It’s difficult to describe the cumulative psychological effect of this to someone who hasn’t experienced narcissistic abuse. All these years later, I know that I have PTSD, or actually C-PTSD — Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s the same disorder experienced by prisoners of war. I know that now, but back then, I had no idea what to call it.

People used to tell me, “just ignore them and they’ll leave you alone.” Or, “you’re just too sensitive, that’s all.” I learned very quickly that ignoring them actually antagonizes them and they will redouble their efforts. As for being too sensitive? I probably was. After years of being treated like shit, day after day, I was very sensitive. I was raw. Try hitting yourself repeatedly on the arm. It won’t hurt much the first few times. But try doing that all day. You’re going to get a bad bruise.

There were physical threats and instances of physical abuse too. Like that time a photographer cranked the audio in my IFB-unit — my ear-piece — while we were setting up for a live-shot, and I crumpled to the ground in pain. He claimed it was a mistake. But I knew…

Then there was the constant gaslighting about my abilities. My colleagues incessantly criticized my work and told me I wasn’t good enough for the job. After five years of this, I became convinced that I was incapable, despite having already won an Emmy.

I was also sick and tired of the business, overall. By now I had covered my fair share of national stories and I had interacted with network reporters, and they had the same kind of meanness in them that my colleagues had. That was how the business was. To be “soft” or “sensitive,” you were thought of as “weak.” Mean people went places. Soft people did not.

Last but not least were my ethical concerns about the industry, and I had many. Here are just a few:

1. Viewers may not realize how much control sponsors have over news. As an insider, I can tell you that stories get pulled from the air or are never aired at all, if they criticize a sponsor. It happened to me at the local level. Imagine how it works at the network level, where billions of dollars in advertising revenue are at stake! Sponsors pay for newsroom staff and operations. If they pull an advertising account because of a negative story, a newsroom can be literally decimated or shut down entirely.

2. There is no distinction between factual and editorial content. “Interpretive reporting” seems to be the model of our time. Instead of just informing viewers of the facts and allowing them to draw their own conclusions, reporters “interpret” the facts and give you their conclusions. As a result, viewers aren’t thinking for themselves anymore. We have hysteria about Russia driven by hyperbole and emotional manipulation, not facts!

3. Emotion equals money in news. Media people know that emotions drive ratings. The better ratings, the more money. If there are two stories about a fatal car crash and one story has the crying widow of the guy who was killed in the wreck, that story is going to get the most ratings because viewers are drawn to emotion. The media knows this, and they use this to manipulate you!

4. TV news is shallow because you cannot tell a complete story in a minute and 20 seconds. But that was what I did, night after night after night. I used to laugh at the public relations people who would give me huge folders full of information for a story that had to air that day. No one has time for that! I skimmed and summarized like everyone else. You are not getting the full story when you watch TV.

5. In broadcasting we were taught to write to a third-grade level. The news director at my first TV station was from the Walter Cronkite generation. He was taught to write to the 8th grade level. Over the years, we were taught to write to progressively lower reading levels to the point where we were writing as if the viewers were all eight- and nine-year-old children! Are people just less educated or is the media dumbing them down? Either way, it always seemed like a mistake to me, to dumb down the news that way.

Packing up and moving on!

That last year before I finally left TV was a hard one. Like most victims of narcissistic abuse, I believed that I was the problem. I scoured the self-help aisle in the book stores, looking for ways to improve myself. I sought therapy. I picked myself apart bit by bit, psychologically and even physically — pulling out my eyelashes. I was obsessed with figuring out what was “wrong” with me. If only I could fix that, maybe people would stop treating me like trash! But no matter how much I scoured and scraped and chipped away at myself, the problem didn’t go away. If anything, it got worse!

There came a point where I was so beaten down that I picked up the 9mm Makarov semi-automatic that I kept in my bedside table, clicked off the safety, and held it to my head. The cartridge was fully loaded. The muzzle felt cool against my temple. All I had to do was gently squeeze the trigger and the pain would finally end…

But my cat needed to eat.

And I wasn’t ready to die.

Instead, I walked away from my decade-long career in television. Just like that. Because fuck it!

My last day was an iconic example of all I had come to hate about the business, and that place. At the morning meeting I pitched a story. I preferred to enterprise my own stories rather than just do whatever the assignment editor came up with. That day, I pitched a story about a deaf man who was petitioning to make fire alarms for the deaf mandatory at the apartment complex where he lived. Fire alarms were required by law, but most just had a klaxon, which he couldn’t hear. He wanted the alarms to feature strobing lights that deaf people could see.

“That’s not very sexy,” the assistant news director said. She was one of those people who always smiles when they’re being sadistic.

I argued the merits of the story but she quickly shut me down, saying, “And how many deaf people do we have in our demographic?”

My. How witty she was.

That evening for the news, she had me standing on the roof of the TV station holding a giant thermometer. She instructed me to warn people that it was hot outside and that they should seek shade.

I guess this was her idea of “sexy”…

The next day I packed my rolodex and handed in my card key. It was over. I was done.

It took years to recover from that experience. I had no desire left to write at all. I was a depressed, anxiety-ridden lump full of self-doubt, courtesy to decades of people telling me I was incapable, incompetent, that something was wrong with me, that I was weird, a freak, crazy, unstable, too sensitive, an “overthinker,” and a million other labels they branded me with. I could hardly move after they got done with me. I was paralyzed for a long time.

Thankfully I learned about narcissism and that changed everything. I began the slow and unpleasant business of removing parasites from my life. It was amazing just how many people I was allowing to suck away my energy, my confidence and my zest for living. I gradually began picking them off, one by one. It was quite painful in some cases, almost like an amputation! You have such hopes for people, and you have to let go of that hope.

Without the constant drama of the shit-stirrers, my life became much more peaceful. I began to relax and trust my own instincts and intuition again. I didn’t miss any of those bullies, either. And with them gone, I made room for new friends who treated me with respect and kindness. The warmth slowly crept back into my soul, which was on the brink of death.

“I Saved My Soul” painting by Vladimir Kush

“I Saved My Soul” painting by Vladimir Kush

Along with toxic people, I had to eliminate toxic beliefs. Among them, the idea that the US is “the greatest country in the world.” That one hurt to let go of. But it’s just a lie, on so many levels. And it’s the kind of lie that prevents us from looking deeper and making changes. I’m sorry to say, when I was working as a TV reporter, I was really quite naïve and poorly informed about American foreign policy and geopolitics. It took years of research to figure out what was really going on.

So I understand how difficult it is to learn the truth, and I try to respect everyone’s journey. I don’t claim to have a handle on it all, but I do know something about Russia, a country I have studied on and off for most of my life. I have friends who live there, people I care about. And it’s important to me, very important, that I convey to readers in the West that these are people. Not “orcs” like your TeeVee wants you to believe. Human beings. And they have a perspective which deserves to be heard and not just dismissed out of hand as “propaganda.”

So that is my agenda.

I want to add my voice to the voices of those who are telling the truth and amplify their voices with my own.

Sorry to disappoint all the people who thought I was the Red Sparrow.

Photo: Depositphotos.com

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About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.