What journalism actually is

“Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” The Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol snarked on reports that Carlson was in Moscow.

Former GOP congressman Adam Kinzinger went further, calling Carlson a “traitor” for visiting Russia’s capital amidst rumors that the journalist traveled to interview Russia’s thuggish President Vladimir Putin. Carlson later confirmed the rumors on X (formerly Twitter.)

“If so, Mr. Carlson would be the first American media figure to land a formal interview with the Russian leader since he invaded Ukraine nearly two years ago,” observed Jim Rutenberg and Milana Mazaeva for The New York Times. Rutenberg and Mazaeva noted that Russia’s own journalists face tight strictures, and that “Mr. Putin’s government has been holding Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, in jail for nearly a year.”

This is entirely true. But it’s not at all uncommon for journalists to interview foreign political leaders, including complete scumbags. Gathering information is core to the job and powerful figures on the world stage are and should be of interest to the public—especially if they pose potential or real danger.

Vladimir Putin was the subject of an interview with Barbara Walters back in 2001. In 2015, Reuters interviewed China’s President (probably for life) Xi Jinping about his intentions on the world stage. Orla Guerin of the BBC spoke with Venezuela’s dictatorial Nicolás Maduro in 2019. Last October, in the wake of Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel, The Economist‘s Zanny Minton Beddoes sat down with Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior official with the terrorist group, to try to understand his thinking.

For that matter, CBS-TV’s Mike Wallace interviewed Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for “60 Minutes” while Iran had American hostages. ABC-TV’s Ted Koppel once interviewed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein for “Nightline” during the Iran–Iraq War.

That interview with Marzouk may come the closest to a present-day interview with Putin because of the context of Hamas’s attack and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For most Americans, both figures are wildly unsympathetic. But it’s not the job of journalists to speak only with popular figures who give their audiences warm and fuzzy feelings. They’re supposed to gather news about everybody, including terrible people who are responsible for war, tyranny, and murder. And there’s a real value in understanding the motives and goals of people who play an important role on the world stage.

“How does Hamas justify the atrocities committed in Israel?” The Economist wrote of the Marzouk interview. “Why has it done this? What does it plan to do with the hostages?”

Putin plays a comparatively bigger role on the world stage, controlling an entire major country and its nuclear arsenal. Some insights into where he’s coming from could be helpful.

“I can’t believe the idea that @TuckerCarlson is a traitor for doing an interview with anyone is taken seriously. Are people two years old? I remember when it was destination television if U.S. anchors scored interviews with the Ayatollah or a Soviet premier,” journalist Matt Taibbi, who has built an independent presence on Substack, pointed out in an effort to bring a measure of sanity to the discussion.

Of course, Tucker Carlson raises eyebrows because he’s a nationalist and populist and seen as, among other unpleasant things, overly sympathetic to Putin’s government. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple called Carlson a “Putin apologist” while MSNBC’s Alex Wagner referred to him as “one of the biggest cheerleaders for Russia.”

Honestly, Russian officials seem to agree; they’ve highlighted his coverage for years as representing a relatively friendly voice in the United States media.

But that doesn’t matter. In free societies, people have the right to embrace whatever political views they like, whether in their personal lives or their professional careers. Those views are certainly fair game for criticism and, the more public the figure, the more legitimate a target they are for high-profile takedowns. But a person’s ideology is neither a ticket to ride nor a bar to entry for trying to make a living as a journalist—or at least it shouldn’t be if we’re going to have anything resembling free media.

Having been fired from Fox News, Carlson built a following on X. Whatever anybody may think of the man and his views—I’m not a fan—it’s to all of our benefit that there’s space for diverse viewpoints espoused by people who don’t need permission from gatekeepers to gather and report news, comment on events, and build followings. The more people engaging in journalism with whom we disagree, especially if we disagree with them in different ways, the more likely that media is uncensored, healthy, and making a fair attempt at getting the job done. If we agree with a few voices, too, so much the better.

Besides, if Tucker Carlson is sympathetic to a foreign dictator, or authoritarian in his beliefs, or just plain politically repulsive, he wouldn’t exactly be breaking new ground among journalists. The excellent 2019 film Mr. Jones documented Gareth Jones’s uphill struggle to reveal the truth of the Holodomor, the deliberate famine inflicted on the Ukrainian people by Joseph Stalin’s communist regime. Among the obstacles to reporting the story were pro-Soviet journalists such as Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize for propagandizing on behalf of Stalin.

No doubt, Carlson sees himself in the Jones truth-teller role here, though he may well be more of a Duranty stand-in. But that’s a verdict to be rendered by public debate and the passage of time, not by a mob screaming “traitor” at somebody who wanders from the ideological reservation.

And there’s certainly nothing to be gained by speculating about barring a journalist from the country because you disagree with his views or his work. Even if we allow that Kristol is just joking, he’s written some terrible things himself—cheerleading for the Iraq War comes to mind—that invite harsh judgment.

But Kristol, like Carlson, shouldn’t be barred from the country or from journalism for wrongthink. A free society and a free press demand that all voices be welcome to speak. Then, once they’ve spoken, they’re fair game for whatever heat is directed their way.

Tuccille’s appears to be a minority view, as Tom Jones (not the singer) chronicles):

I wrote in Wednesday’s newsletter that Tucker Carlson is in Russia and now it has been confirmed: He has, indeed, interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin. That interview is expected to air today, most likely on  Carlson’s streaming site and on X.

In teasing the interview, Carlson took a shot at other journalists by saying, “… not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview” Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour snapped back on X, saying that it’s “absurd” to think Western journalists haven’t tried to interview Putin.

Even the Russians called out Carlson’s ridiculous claim.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “Mr. Carlson is wrong. We receive many requests for interviews with the president.”

Peskov said the Kremlin has denied interview requests from large Western outlets, but it granted Carlson’s request because “his position is different” from what the Kremlin calls “Anglo-Saxon media.” Peskov said of Carlson, “It’s not pro-Russian, not pro-Ukrainian, it’s pro-American.”

Oh, so now the Kremlin wants to cooperate with someone because they are “pro-American?”

The Washington Post’s Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova wrote, “The Kremlin’s decision to allow the interview demonstrated Putin’s interest in building bridges to the disruptive MAGA element of the Republican Party, and it seemed to reflect the Kremlin’s hope that Donald Trump would return to the presidency and that Republicans would continue to block U.S. military aid to Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, back here in the United States, Carlson has very little, if any, credibility among real journalists or media observers.

Political commentator Steve Schmidt — a strategist who worked on campaigns for John McCain, George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger and helped found The Lincoln Project — wrote on Substack, “Why is Tucker Carlson in Russia? The answer is simple. Carlson despises America as much as Putin does, though for different reasons. Tucker Carlson is what the Russians call a ‘useful idiot.’”

Schmidt added, “He is a vessel for foreign poison to reach our free society, in which he seems to delight, undermining with lies, omissions and utter nonsense. It is important to remember that Tucker Carlson is not engaged in an act of dissent or speech. He is a propagandist carrying water for a Russian war criminal who hates the United States, and is committed to conflict with the west. He is a purveyor of racial malice, election denialism and dozens of conspiracy theories. He is being covered in Russia by state TV like the NFL covers Taylor Swift at a Chiefs game. It is a sickening display. Tucker Carlson has become a dangerous demagogue in recent years. His actions and conduct are reprehensible. He is no journalist. He is a very bad American. Tucker Carlson is a stooge, and specifically he is Putin’s stooge. What a disgrace.”

During his show on NewsNation, anchor Chris Cuomo said, “Tucker Carlson is getting exactly what he wants: attention. Now, frankly, I don’t care. His explanation of why he’s doing it — that he’s a journalist and he needs to inform people; he can call himself whatever he wants. I think his work is demonstrable as not being just about giving people information. He has a point of view and often it’s not aligned with the facts.”

Anne Applebaum, the staff writer for The Atlantic and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, tweeted, “Many journalists have interviewed Putin, who also makes frequent, widely covered speeches. Carlson’s interview is different because he is not a journalist, he’s a propagandist, with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption.”

Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, took a jab at Carlson for claiming no Western media bothered to interview Putin, tweeting, “Poor, poor Vladimir Putin. Until now, nobody in the West has had the chance to hear him explain all the excellent reasons for why he had to invade Ukraine. Not in the speech that was broadcast live on every global network the morning of the invasion, and not in countless others.”

It should be noted that Trofimov is a colleague of the Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned in Russia on trumped-up charges of espionage since March 2023.

I wonder if Carlson grilled Putin about that?

Finally, there is this tweet from Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats about Carlson’s bragging that he is the only one with a journalist’s determination to interview Putin: “Unbelievable! I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1000 Ritz suite in Moscow.”

Censorship is not part of a free society.