Tucker Carlson: Putin takes charge as TV host gives free rein to Kremlin
The Russian leader was given the opportunity to expound familiar grievances unchallenged.
What's America's view on this Tucker Carlson?
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This line of critique is wrongheaded and empowers Tucker. Putin already commands a platform far above Tucker's, a media figure cannot provide a bigger platform for Putin than the one he already has. Many liberal journalists have interviewed Putin without facing this critique, it's applied here because Tucker is a reactionary shithead.
The better critique is that you have for-profit entertainment companies capitalizing on this, and how that affects the content.
What liberal media journalists have managed to interview Putin since he began his invasion of Ukraine in 2022? I thought Carlson was the first Western person to manage that.
I'd argue Carlson also didn't manage to interview him, apparently Putin just rambled along without answering any questions.
He did his best to show what an idiot Tucker was though, which is fun:
At another juncture, Carlson asked Putin if he saw God’s design in world political affairs. With a bored look that seemed to imply he was talking to someone with a below average IQ, Putin merely said “no” before explaining that international laws governed world events, not a deity.
https://gizmodo.com/tucker-carlson-x-elon-musk-vladimir-putin-russia-interv-1851244271
(Sorry for all the Twitter embeds in that link.)
Adding the qualifier of "since 2022" seems to presume there's an unspoken taboo between western liberal media that Putin shan't be interviewed, rather than Putin being more restrictive than he already was and seeing an opportunity in Tucker. Lionel Barber is probably the closest a "real" US journalist could have been to Putin and writes about the increasing difficulty of this in 2020. This includes psychological tricks like being made to wait excessively long to weaken his cognition before the meeting. He has a good piece on Tucker's interview about how Putin ran the show and used him.
The reason why Putin chose this interview is because Tucker is a locus of division in US politics. Tucker isn't raising Putin's platform, Putin is raising Tucker's platform. This imbues Tucker's reactionary politics with more legitimacy, which benefits Putin.
