Having been sacked by Fox News, Tucker Carlson, in May last year, declared he was striking out on his own on X, as Twitter’s now called, now that it’s been Elon-gated.
He was sacked because he was running amok. So he doubled down, having already won a considerable online constituency. This deal with Dark Vlad the Invader is symptomatic of his approach to his craft. It’s worth dissecting for that reason.
“At the most basic level,” he admonished his followers in early May 2023, “the news you consume is a lie, a lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind … Facts have been withheld on purpose along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated.” And what better way to demonstrate this than by flying to Moscow to hear from the Tsar of all the Russias the truth about things?
What is not clear, from Carlson’s two hours with the Pope of Propaganda, is what lies he was seeking to correct, what facts had been withheld from the American people or the rest of us, and why the man to whom he was giving his platform could be trusted to tell the truth.
He asked Putin a series of Dorothy Dixers and allowed the man to pontificate about the need to “denazify” Ukraine, deny that he had any ambitions beyond that, declare that the war would be over in a few weeks if the West simply stopped supplying Ukraine with weapons.
There’s been a storm in a teacup since the interview went to air about whether or not it was appropriate for a journalist to go to Moscow and interview Putin. This entirely misses the point. Carlson was hand-picked by the Kremlin, which tolerates no significant political opposition or free press, to provide its master with a bully pulpit from which to sell his mendacious worldview to the gullible and isolationist folk who lap up what TC has to say.
Let’s imagine a rather different journalist going to Moscow and fantasise that Putin agreed to the interview and to its being broadcast and let the journalist leave the country in one piece.
It couldn’t be me, I’ve been sanctioned by the Kremlin and cannot travel to Russia at all. But what questions would it be useful to put to Putin at close quarters, if one’s agenda was, in fact, to dispel lies and propaganda, provide proportion and perspective?
Said journalist might begin with the following questions:
President Putin, would you remind our viewers what the guarantees were that Russia gave to Ukraine regarding its borders and its territorial integrity when the USSR was dissolved?
Would you remind our viewers of the reasons why you shut down all independent media in Russia and have conducted relentless disinformation and influence operations against the liberal democracies for the past couple of decades?
Why, exactly, is Alexei Navalny in prison? Is it because, among other things, he is a critic of your invasion of Ukraine and has declared that Russia’s just borders are and should remain those it agreed to it 1991?
How many journalists, political dissidents and human rights activists, or for that matter critics of your war, have been murdered or imprisoned on your watch? Do you have a number?
Why would you say that your armed forces bungled their invasion of Ukraine so badly in 2022 and how do you justify to yourself the hundreds of thousands of deaths and shattered lives that your war has cost?
Your former economic adviser Andrey Ilarionov, a highly competent economist and a sober individual, has stated that you have broken every agreement you or the Russian state have ever entered into with Ukraine. Can you name one that you have not violated?
He has further stated that, if the West abandoned Ukraine to your conquest, you would keep encroaching on neighbouring states and pressing the EU until you were stopped. Why should we believe you rather than him?
Needless to say, Tucker Carlson didn’t wade in like this. Had there been any indication that he would treat Putin the way he was accustomed to treating various individuals on his TV show, the conversation over a little table in Moscow simply would not have taken place. Contrary to Carlson’s X-rated rant about mainstream media being full of insidious lies, Putin’s whole modus operandi has always been insidious and mendacious.
The way to correct for deficiencies in conventional wisdom is to investigate and make reasoned, sometimes passionate critiques of it. Does Carlson truly believe this isn’t happening in the United States?
What appears to have eluded him is that one attempts to do such things in Putin’s Russia (or Xi Jinping’s China) at the risk of one’s life and with almost no outlets in which to publish. But he thinks we are being misled in the West and that he can sort things out by talking to the dictator.
He failed abysmally. More precisely, he gave Putin just what Putin wanted and delivered a further blow to his own credibility. The decision by Fox News to terminate Carlson has been vindicated. He’s not a serious journalist, but a clown.
Paul Monk is the author of The West in a Nutshell (2009) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018) among other books.
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