Tucker Carlson Could Face Sanctions Over Putin Interview
Tucker Carlson Could Face Sanctions Over Putin Interview
115 comments
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"In authoritarian China/Russia/Cuba/DPRK/[insert bad country here], being caught talking to enemies of the regime can result in persecution by the state"
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In authoritarian bad country, professional bowtie journalists spread racist hatred to cause dissent among the impoverished for the sake of the elite ruling class, but they are forbidden from speaking to foreign enemies
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It's always projection. 100%. All the time. It never ends.
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Why does the page have a “fairness” feedback meter, and how is enlightened centrism “factual and fair”?
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The more opinions you have the more biased you are, thus sitting on your ass and accepting the status quo is the purest form of thinking possible.
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Because question-begging centrism is all that any of these really are
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Enlightened centrism has exactly 57 miligrams of fairness which is the recommended daily dose for adults. Your health will suffer if you get too much or too little fairness.
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Bringing balance to the Force was a lie. The Jedi played us for fools. Execute Order 66. Palpatine did nothing wrong.
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All of these media bias meters seem to have the same approach: only centrism is factual. What if reality is not the way the "centre" understands it?
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Check out these dumb-ass media bias graphs. I swear most Americans have potato media literacy.
Folks, please go read Manufacturing Consent, or better still Inventing Reality. A five-minute primer: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
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Freedom of the press and protection of journalists in the West. If he went to talk to Netanyahu no one would have minded.
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Too true. Our Media publishes all of Israels lies on the front page with a tiny quote that attributes it to the IDF.
They repeat those lies over multiple articles. And they keep quoting those lies. Over and over.
But one interview with Putin is a line too far...
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Main difference is that one is an evil war criminal while the other is a "good" war criminal
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Tucker Carlson is a fascist prick but this is ridiculous. He interviewed a guy and made it public. He did basic journalism. It might not be good journalism and it might be biased against the official party line but it is not like he has shot up an Ukrainian orphanage or something.
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Tucker spouting white supremacist homophobic transphobic speech
EU sleeps
Tucker flies to the EU or Russia to talk to another right winger about the weather or some shit
EU freak out
Really lets you know what their priorities are.
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By EU standards, Putin is basically a centrist..
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If Assange and Snowden can't come back, why cucker?
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I always love how quickly the liberal mask falls off. The west is all about freedom, democracy, and free speech, until it's something the lib mainstream doesn't like to hear. It's quite telling you're not asking why Assange and Snowden are being prosecuted for revealing what they revealed, but you're upset that this isn't happening more.
Turns out that those who label Communists as tankies and authoritarians are well-aware of the necessity to suppress divergent viewpoints. Freedom of expression is limited to ideas that align with the liberal narrative; when faced with opinions they deem detrimental, liberals demand cancellation, imprisonment, or even death for the proponents.
The real disagreement liberals have with the Communists is over what set of ideas has merit. When liberals screech about authoritarianism what they're really saying is that it's their ideology that's being suppressed.
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It's wild to me how many allegedly left-leaning or "liberal" people who say they believe in open societies, free expression, etc will gladly throw all that out the window if it means they get to punish somebody they disagree with. This trend has really picked up the last 10 years or so. Fuck tucker carlson but he has a right to speak freely and it's terrifying that the government can sanction a journalist, even a shitty one, for the crime of interviewing somebody.
Jailing or sanctioning journalists and critics is some shit Putin and other despots do, let's not emulate him. I would stand with anybody who is sanctioned by the government for their speech regardless of how much I disagree with it.
Societies which stifle dissent, especially using the power of the state, grow weaker because they aren't able to effectively adapt to change. Remember it is not too long ago that advocating for gay marriage would have been seen as morally deviant and repugnant. But strong speech protections allow us as a society to have that discussion and come to the correct conclusion which is that it's fine to be gay, that love is love, and that gay people deserve equal protection under the law.
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Jailing or sanctioning journalists and critics is some shit Putin and other despots do, let's not emulate him.
Let's not pretend that whichever western states are included in "us" here aren't similarly despotic. It makes little difference whether you kill the journalist yourself or have a dog like Israel do it and then cover for them.
I would stand with anybody who is sanctioned by the government for their speech regardless of how much I disagree with it.
Hate speech is bad and dying on the hill that people should be able to advocate for genocide is nothing but useful idiocy for fascists.
None of this is especially relevant to the particulars of this case, obviously Putin has mostly rather banal things to say, because it's either a: correct, b: wretchedly chauvinist in a way that Republicans agree with (e.g. homophobia), or c: that weird revanchist shit that doesn't mean anything. I just think your ideology is intellectually and practically suicidal and wanted to comment on part of it.
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I agree with you in part, but:
Societies which stifle dissent, especially using the power of the state, grow weaker because they aren't able to effectively adapt to change. Remember it is not too long ago that advocating for gay marriage would have been seen as morally deviant and repugnant. But strong speech protections allow us as a society to have that discussion and come to the correct conclusion which is that it's fine to be gay, that love is love, and that gay people deserve equal protection under the law.
Free speech is also allowing a massive, astroturfed campaign to spread transphobia. The people with the most money have the loudest voices, and printing sensationalist bigotry to provoke fear, anger, and hate gets the clicks which makes more money.
What makes it especially terrifying, and I'm speaking from personal experience, is that you don't know who's on the other side of the screen. Most people in the target audience will just get a little pissy and keep clicking headlines (and voting to take away rights), but there's also people who are unstable, whether due to drugs or psychological issues or simply being too deep into the narrative. When you have for example far-right media outlets saying trans people are pedophiles, and more mainstream sources validating that perspective in not so many words, and that's being broadcast to some meth head watching hours on end every day, then I'm not really a fan of that speech being free.
Just last weekend, for instance, some queer friends and I were threatened by an unstable person with a metal pipe just walking down the street, idk how much the media plays into that but I also had a family member who did what I described above, shooting up meth and watching shit like OAN all day every day. And even regular people who watch too much cable news, and it doesn't even matter that much what they watch, if you try to reason with them, no matter how much sense you make or what facts you have on your side, it's one conversation vs all the time they've spent watching the news - I like to compare it to trying to win an argument when the other side gets to say 100 words (or more) every time you say 1. In this way, good ideas don't always win in the marketplace of ideas.
But yeah I agree with your overall point, sanctioning someone for interviewing a world leader is some bullshit, fuck Tucker Carlson but it's always important to understand rival geopolitical powers.
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This instance of an unstable person consuming content online and then and going to hurt people in real life is scary, but I'd propose that maybe unstable people who hurt people based on what they read are kind of inevitably going to end up on that trajectory regardless of the freedom of our speech spaces. And that maybe it's not worth sacrificing the free speech of all people simply because a few people are going to do bad things, even if that speech in part motivated them.
What you're describing where people end up in their own media bubble is exactly why we need more open access to speech and free, neutral platforms for people to have these kinds of discussions on. There is a major push in society for everybody to splinter off into spaces where everybody agrees with them and, idk, that's exactly what happens to people when they go down the quanon/OAN/etc rabbit hole. We have lost to many "third spaces" in public where we might have these kinds of discussions and everybody keeps getting more polarized.
The problem with hate speech the last 10 years has much more to do with the "I get in 1 word, they get in 100" problem than anything else. When you get into where people get their news, social media is a big part of that puzzle and Facebook et al has been able to put their thumb on the scale in a major way to spread hateful divisive content. Nazis has access to the internet in the 90s and 2000s, but they were in their own little bubbles and couldn't do a whole lot. It's social media that gave them a real platform by incentivizing their content and choosing, algorithmically, to promote posts which got "engagement". Likes are engagement, angry reacts are engagement, comments are engagement. Reddit had a decent system with incentivizing upvotes, but incentivizing all engagement? You get civil wars. Not only did this incentivization mechanism make divisive content more likely to show up in people's feeds, but it created a financial incentive for those posters to make divisive content and it made Facebook's bottom line predicated on divisive content.
People are scared of the spread of hate speech and the right in the right wing it's causing and they are ready to throw "free speech" as a concept out because they are so afraid of it. We don't need to do that. What we need to do is take away the power social media companies have to influence the types and quantity of information we receive. If we do that, online hate speech will retreat back into it's little bubble and it will be a thing 1% of people hear and get influenced by, not 30%. Luckily, I think this is already happening. Fedi is a good move in this direction.
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Tucker isn't a journalist, he's an entertainer, or at least, a propagandist.
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Agreed, but going around interviewing politicians and posting that online is clearly a journalistic activity. Should Barbara Walters have been thrown in jail or sanctioned for interviewing Castro? A marketplace of ideas in a free society requires the ability to hear the arguments of all sides so we can form rebuttals to them and arrive at some kind of consensus, as a society, about what our values are and how our institutions ought to reflect those values. We don't have to give a platform to those ideas, we can be wise about how and where those ideas are discussed and shared, but we don't hand over the power to make those decisions to the government because in the past governments have been pretty terrible custodians of that power.
And a free, unrestrained press is our first line of defense against governments trending towards tyranny and authoritarianism. Governments trying to repress speech is the "canary in the coalmine" that they are getting more authoritarian and corrupt. If we don't draw a line in the sand there, the next few steps they take will be even harder to fight back against as we will have lost our ability as a society to be aware of and share information about it. Look at Putin, look at Trump, look at Hitler, look at Orban. The first thing they do when they get elected is de-legitimize the press and try to restrict their ability to publish.
Whether he's a journalist or not, he's a US citizen, he has a right to free speech guaranteed under the constitution and the UN declaration of human rights. The EU has a similar document.
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I have to agree with your overall sentiment. However, there's at least a valid argument to be made that providing a media mouthpiece for Putin, who many consider a war criminal, has the potential to increase global unrest and lead to additional deaths in a way that few examples of protected speech do.
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providing a media mouthpiece for Putin, who many consider a war criminal, has the potential to increase global unrest and lead to additional deaths
Now apply this standard to Western politicians, like Bush, or Biden, or most of them, honestly.
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There’s not an argument about the danger of platforming here, because his power doesn’t come from a media position. He’s the head of a State. His power is self sustaining, and is going to exist regardless if he’s interviewed or not.
I’m sure Tucker is going to do a shitty, glazing interview, but that’s pretty regular for him.
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Where, exactly, should the line be draw then between "reporting" and "being a mouthpiece". Because if you can't codify a set of very clear standards that can exist in law, the government will use every last bit of ambiguity to repress dissent, especially when the government is not being headed by somebody on your "side". In the US, there are some very clear, very specific carve-outs for the 1st amendment.
George Bush is considered by many to be a war criminal, he invaded two countries with no legal pretext. Should his writings or paintings be banned speech? Should the government be able to censor him? How about Pinochet? or Stalin? How can we learn about history if we cannot see and understand why one side acted the way they did? What their motivations were? We don't censor those things, and we shouldn't. The USSR however did widely censor the writings of western authors, using much the same arguments you make here.
The easier solution is to not grant the government that kind of censorship power, acknowledge that words are just words and we being free people can discern fact from fiction and come to our own conclusions, and push for platforms to not give airtime to hacks like Tucker. If you do not believe people can hear two arguments and discern which is better, you may as well give up on democracy entirely. The whole concept of democracy is premised on believing that people can do that. If they can't, we may as well hand over all our liberties to the nearest wannabe dictator and be done with the inefficiencies of voting.
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Notably, Putin doesn't really need a mouthpiece. He's not some unheard of hermit with no power to spread how ideology, he's a dictator of an extremely large country. This is seen as in poor taste because it's implying the former, while being an expression of the latter.
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Eagerly awaiting the EU to sanction all US aligned propagandists as well...
Oh wait that will never happen
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I think it’s so funny people are having long debates in this comment section and it’s essentially just saying a wealthy guy may or may not be able to fly to the EU because he did something.
Literally nothing has happened and I gotta read 87 paragraphs about whether I should be a free speech absolutist or not,
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Is Dr Manhattan's power stored in his glutes? wtf
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I like that people are having the discussion, I also like that I skipped it.
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the sheer hysteria over this is equal parts hilarious and revealing
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#BlueAnon report:
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: smells like russian troll-
Rookie mistake. I always take a shower before posting.
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🤣
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Find me a single American journalist that interviewed Hitler after he invaded Poland. I'll wait.
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How about you find me a single American journalist who stopped interviewing members of the Bush administration after they invaded Iraq.
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Not just interviewing Hitler, but only asking the questions Hitler wanted, and then urging the world to listen because everybody needs to hear his side
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Just so we're clear here, what you're suggesting that engaging in wars of aggression automatically equates the country with the nazi Germany?
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Comparing Putin with Hitler is a form of Nazi apologia
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might be a better place to ask your question. This is a thread about something else. Wiegand would be the obvious one tho.
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I doubt anything will come of this, it's just an interview, probably just some big talk from people in EU parliament, I guess Russia did the exact same thing when they sanctioned Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, but I would be surprised if the EU stoops to that level, it's frankly petty to target private citizens doing media stuff regardless of what it is or how much you disagree with it.
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but I would be surprised if the EU stoops to that level, it's frankly petty to target private citizens doing media stuff regardless of what it is or how much you disagree with it.
"Am I a joke to you?"
- Jullian Assange
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[I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can’t see this comment anymore]
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That should tell you what America's goals ultimately are.
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Tucker should be sanctioned for being a bowtie wearing shit eating reactionary named "Tucker" first and foremost.
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Facts
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Another demonstration of the vaunted Western ValuesTM
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Okay I don’t really like this bootleg Cold War thing we’ve got going on but any outcome where Tucker Carlson gets harmed is one I can accept
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first they came for the carlsons and i was .... i cant
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Cucker was in danger of sliding into irrelevance after the fox news firing. His twitter show was a failure too. He knew he needed to do something big to stay relevant and this is that thing. He'll be able to ride it for a while but after it fizzles out, he'll need to come up with the next attention-grabbing scheme. It's all about keeping the grift going. He doesn't give a shit about any of this, It's all about the money and the fame.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Carlson's work in Russia could see the former Fox News host in hot water with the EU, Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian Prime Minister and current member of the European Parliament, told Newsweek.
Explaining his motive for the interview, Carlson said in a video statement on Tuesday: "Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now."
If deemed sufficient, the EAS can then present the case to the European Council—the body made up of EU national leaders—which takes the final decision on whether to impose sanctions.
One European diplomatic official, who did not wish to be named as they were not authorized to speak publicly, told Newsweek that any future travel restrictions would likely require proof that he is linked to Moscow's aggression, something that "is absent or hard to prove."
The content of Carlson's interview with Putin is not yet clear but, given the pundit's long-time defense of aspects of Russian policy, critics expect it to be sympathetic to Moscow.
"First of all, it should be remembered that Putin is not just a president of an aggressor country, but he is wanted by the International Criminal Court and accused of genocide and war crimes," MEP Urmas Paet, who previously served as Estonia's foreign minister, told Newsweek.
The original article contains 765 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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How long before he announces a Trump interview as well. Mule transporting information between Russians.
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He already has interviewed Trump lol. Also they could just have staffers call each other like normal people.
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What happened to gravelly voiced men in trench coats exchanging information in a poorly lit parking lot?
Fucking zoomers man.
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BlueAnon
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It’s her turn
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The "her" in question:
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My favorite thing about the interview is when he literally told Putin to "shut the fuck up and get back to the script" when he started talking about the Nazis being bad. Like shit man, if you didn't have the soft power you had I don't think you'd be leaving Russia after that one.
It was wild in general seeing Putin as not being the most wicked man in the room, which isn't hard when the other person is probably one of the most notorious neo-nazi propagandists in America who literally quit their golden job because they asked him to hide the racism a bit better.
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I have followed 'news' from Russian outlets such as RT and Sputnik, being recast as Right wing talking points within hours. This is not just recent, it has been going on for years. Hamilton68 documents examples. The parallels of this propaganda being sown to the lies dispensed to Ukraine to sow dissention is obvious. It is a cheap warfare, and it works. Tucker was and is in the trade of packaging Russian propaganda as news. He should be labeled as such. Carlson was discredited and fired by Fox. Spreading lies, admitting to doing so on archived tapes, and iirc, sexual harassment was in his part of the discovery on Fox's $780M settlement. In short, Tucker Carlson is on record for knowingly spreading lies, for personal monetary benefit. This is more of the same. I hope every person watches Carlson, knowing that Carlson reports what enriches him, not truth. Carlson has a transparent agenda. The unanswered question is who pays Carlson. That will be obvious by who's boots that Carlson's reports shine.
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Tucker was and is in the trade of packaging Russian propaganda as news
And much of the US "journalists" are in the business of packaging US propaganda as news. There is just as much propaganda - if not more - in general US news. Since the US likes to portray itself as hosting a free press, one would assume (if one were pretty naive, admittedly) it would be glad to have reporting on the Russian government's positions and communiqués.
Hamilton68 documents examples
lmao this is a CIA outlet:
The organization is chaired and run primarily by former senior United States intelligence and State Department officials. Laura Thornton, formerly of International IDEA, joined ASD as its new director in May 2021. Laura Rosenberger, chair of the American Institute in Taiwan and former senior director for China on the Biden administration's National Security Council, previously served as a director of ASD. ASD is housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and its work spans across both the United States and Europe
Even the fucking Washington Post (of all newpapers !) admits they're not exactly a source to be trusted.
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Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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This is in part one of those situations where your argument amounts to question-begging. The reason being, just as a test: What if Russia was on the correct side of the war, would this still be coherent? Is there any contradiction in these Russian publicity outlets publishing correct information that is then opportunistically used by the rival party to the current US administration to discredit the latter?
If you already assume slava ukra'ini and that reactionaries have some magical inability to say things that are true, you can make a coherent story, but I would argue that the antithesis is at least as coherent a story.
I'm sure RT, etc. also publish bullshit that is also used by the right just as readily, but imo the Russian center-right can get by on policy wrt Ukraine by simply reporting facts faithfully, because theirs is a position [shared by much of the Russian left as well] that is only more justified as historical context increases and actors are more closely scrutinized. I was objectively late to the party when, in 2018, I was reading about the CIA backing Azov, but still I saw reality completely recast leading up to the invasion and thereby I had some advantage over the liberals who seem to believe that Ukraine is Palestine despite the fact that it's Ukraine slaughtering ethnic minorities.
It doesn't help that Ukraine can't seem to find pictures of its military that don't include fascist symbols, or that they absolutely wear their banderite bullshit on their sleeve if you actually listen to them speak. You can just report on these things faithfully and make the Ukrainian government and especially its military look monstrous to many viewers.
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It’s amazing what lengths Carlson goes to in order to stay relevant. Sad, really.
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Shame. He could have taken out 2 fashists with 1 press of a button...
115 comments
like i don't give a shit about tuck but in what reality is simply talking to the "enemy" some kind of punishable offense. y'all supposed to be all about free press, are they not free to speak to bad people?
When Russia has repeatedly denied requests from other journalists in the past, I don't think that you can really associate Carlson with being "free press". This is a business deal, not journalism. How should we treat people who engage in business deals with sanctioned individuals?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-vladimir-putin-interview-b2492192.html
"Press" has always been a business. This isn't the dunk you think it is. They have always dealt with and interviewed sanctioned individuals. Some even interview prisoners! Imagine, interviewing not just somebody accused of breaking the law, but somebody convicted of it, like Mandela! What should we do with those journalists? According to some people on this thread:
Your three sources are all undeniable propaganda. If you don't think Tucker Carlson is a serious journalist, that's perfectly understandable, but surely even the bottom of the barrel is more serious than the literal agents of the governments you're at war with? If I was Putin, I'd also turn down the literal BBC. Libs are so up their own ego they can't imagine someone not wanting to be filtered through their state's propaganda apparatus.
Actually I kind of think the whole “get all precious about free speech” thing is kind of played out and mostly right wing bullshit anyhow
yeah but catching libs in a bind about it when 60% of their ideology is malding at hypocrisy is kinda funny
Spreading propaganda of genocidal maniacs is the industry standard of American media figures. You going to be calling for sanctions on anyone who talked to Joe Biden or George Bush? Or do you only care when it's foreigners?