Despite Concerns Circulated by the Mainstream Media, Carlson’s Interview with Putin Doesn’t Threaten Democracy
After news broke earlier this month that long-time television personality and journalist Tucker Carlson would be interviewing Russian president Vladimir Putin, several media outlets were quick to criticize Carlson.
CNN’s Erin Burnet characterized Tucker Carlson as “one of the leaders of the MAGA GOP” and said he had gone “there as a Putin-supporting celebrity.” Another CNN anchor, Abby Phillip, called Carlson interviewing Putin a “Russian nesting doll,” with guest, former Obama confidante David Axelrod remarking that when he first “heard he was there, I assumed he was there to get an award. There isn’t an American who has done more for Vladimir Putin than Tucker Carlson.” The Daily Beast ran a piece entitled “Kremlin Cronies: Putin-Tucker Interview Will ‘Blow Up’ U.S. Election,” and MSNBC’s Jen Psaki called Carlson “just another far-right conspiracy peddler with a show on the Internet...He has to stay relevant somehow.” Adam Kinzinger, a former US Congressional representative and now CNN commentator called Carlson a “traitor” while pundit Bill Kristol floated banning him from the United States.
It’s perfectly fair to criticize Carlson for the questions he asks — or doesn’t ask — to Putin during the interview. However, Carlson’s interview with Putin sits neatly in the American tradition of interviewing adversaries:
In 1955, CBS’s Face the Nation interviewed Nikita Khrushchev, traveling to the Soviet Union to do so.
In 1977, Barbara Walters famously interviewed Fidel Castro, just a little more than a decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Castro even took Walters to the mountains for the five-hour interview, to the same region he served as a guerilla fighter.
In 1990, Barbara Walters continued her streak of interviewing foreign leaders by sitting down with Jiang Zemin, who was leading the Chinese Communist Party at the time. Zemin famously called the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which took place the previous year, “much ado about nothing.”
In 1998, ABC News’s John Miller interviewed Osama Bin Laden. In that interview, Miller explained Bin Laden’s motives carefully: “Bin Laden believes that what we consider to be terrorism is just the amount of violence required to get the attention of the American people.”
The New York Times also gave Putin a chance not to be interviewed but to simply offer his side of the story in an op-ed published in 2013.
In each of these cases, a mainstream American journalist was interviewing someone who was either an adversary of the United States or deeply hated for their role in past and present abuses. While Carlson may have falsely claimed other Western journalists haven’t tried to interview Putin, their interview is not uniquely threatening to democracy given this history.
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