Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin: Danger to the Establishment

I read and listened to the hysteria in the West around the news that American journalist Tucker Carlson was going to Moscow to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This interview makes him the first representative of the Western media to ask questions personally to Putin after the start of the Russian “special operation” in Ukraine two years ago.

Why is Carlson’s interview with Putin important to Americans? The fact is that Carlson does not fit into the mainstream of liberal media. He criticises the Democrats and the “deep state” behind them from the position of “one-story America”, which professes traditional values and which the leading American media is feeding with liberal bubble gum.

Carlson is an information detox for Americans.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said of the interview: “It is in no way pro-Russian, not pro-Ukrainian, it is rather pro-American. But at least it contrasts with the position of these traditional Anglo-Saxon media.”

He is no longer just a popular TV host. He is, let’s say without pathos, the ruler of the minds of a significant part of the American electorate. The video blog created by Carlson after leaving the Fox News channel, Tucker Carlson Network (TCN), competes with all broadcast and cable TV channels in the United States.

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It is, as Carlson himself says in TCN’s introduction to the blog site, “an alternative to legacy media”.

Therefore, Carlson is dangerous for the establishment. He is so prominent with his opinion that he cannot be silenced by throwing him off the air of a famous TV channel.

He himself is already a phenomenon in the international information space; the American Establishment cannot brush him aside like an annoying fly.

That is why the leading US media – all as one – are trying to downplay the significance of the interview and turning everything inside out. Bloomberg hints that Carlson needs this to become vice-president under Donald Trump:

“Carlson, 54, has used his influential media platform to question US support for Ukraine, defend the Kremlin and support Trump. State-run Russian television frequently airs clips from his interviews. Trump, who is seeking re-election in November, has said that he would consider Carlson as a possible running mate.”

Almost all American media are trying to shift attention from the fact of Putin’s interview to the fact that in Russia, they say, the free press is being persecuted and American journalists are being repressed.

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“Putin’s government has limited Western journalists’ ability to cover Russia and jailed Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkowitz for more than 10 months on espionage charges that he, his employer and the United States government deny,” writes The New York Times.

But if the “bad Putin” allegedly actually “radically limited the ability of Western journalists to cover Russia”, then what’s wrong with the same Putin giving an interview to Carlson?

Why is everyone in the West so worried that Putin’s words can be heard, that his point of view can be voiced? Isn’t it that in a democratic and liberal society, à la West, all views are aired?

What I know from my media studies and working for several foreign media outlets, the Western media taught us that in “good” journalism that you should be “objective” – balancing, fair and giving both sides of the story.

But they failed to tell us as their interns and correspondents that sometimes you must break those principles. This Western media behaviour does not come out clearly from our mainline media scholars’ literature.