Tucker Carlson interview with Putin: what went wrong?
In the week or so before Carlson published his interview with Vladimir Putin, the talking heads on Russian state television spoke glowingly of what could be expected. Their logic was that Tucker Carlson is the most influential journalist in the English-speaking world with a vast audience of viewers and that he would make available to the world the complete, uncensored recording of his conversation with Putin.
What has been withheld from the American public would now reach them directly. The Ukraine war financed and armed by the Biden administration has proceeded amidst a blackout on Russian news sources that are systematically condemned as ‘disinformation’ or propaganda. With the help of Carlson, the eyes of Americans and others in the Collective West would be opened to reality, opened to the logic of Putin’s thinking and to the Russian view of the way out of the ongoing crisis.
As soon as it was confirmed from Moscow that the interview actually took place and would be made available on Carlson’s internet platform, major Western broadcasters raised a hullabaloo. The loudest voice of condemnation came from CNN, where a television presenter denounced Carlson as a fraud, a non-journalist, citing accusations against him dating from the lawsuits that ultimately cost Carlson his job at Fox News. Carlson’s claim in his address from Red Square issued on the day before the interview’s release that he had done what no one else in Western media had dared to do was called a lie: CNN and others said they had been banging on the Kremlin’s door to do an interview with Putin but had received only refusals.
Meanwhile Russian state television maintained that Carlson had been granted this extraordinary favor because he alone, as opposed to mainstream media, would guaranty that the final product aired had no cuts.
I have several remarks to make on the Carlson interview after going through all two hours of it. The first and most damaging remark is that its being uncut, or unedited if you will, is precisely its biggest fault. What we have here is an undisciplined, self-indulgent work of journalism that has all the negative aspects of self-publication. There is a reason why editors existed as a profession, and it is a tough trade-off to accept unlimited transparency at the price of zero quality control. It is a mistake to believe that editing has to serve only hostile intentions.
I say this in full knowledge that I and my fellow commentators who publish essays on their own websites or who publish books on Amazon subsidiaries face this very problem daily.
But back to Carlson and Putin:
For at least ten years, I have been following Vladimir Putin’s speeches and his performance during televised Q&A sessions that can last hours. He was always very impressive for tightly argued points that drew on his encyclopedic memory. Here the very ground rules stating that the discussion would go on without any time limitation worked against Putin’s strengths: he became prolix, did not answer a given question but repeatedly went back to further develop his answer to a previous question, and so on. Worst of all, he decided to open his ‘serious discussion’ with Carlson by delivering a 15 minute history lecture on Russia and Ukraine going back to the 9th century and taking his sweet time bringing us up to the period just before WWI. I can easily imagine that the audience for this video will have contracted by half or more at that point.
The interview became interesting only after the 50 minute point. Putin then spoke about the draft agreement to end the war initialed by the Ukrainian side at negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022. He discussed denazification, what it means and how it had been dealt with in the draft 2022 treaty. Still more serious material comes up as from one hour seven minutes when Putin talks about how Russia’s threat to the West is an invention to scare their publics and pass financing for the war. His explanation for Russia’s putting blame for the Nord Stream bombing on Washington was good, as were his remarks on Germany’s silence on the subject. At one hour 18 minutes, Putin speaks well about multipolarity in global affairs, from which he goes on to a solid description of how the United States is doing serious damage to the dollar as the currency of international trade by its wrong-minded sanctions policies.
I think that those who stay with the interview this far will also appreciate what Putin has to say about his relationship with American Presidents and how the decision makers on foreign policy are really the elites, whose minds are stuck in the pre-1991 prejudices.
At times, Carlson posed questions that do him no credit. Asking Putin how an observant Christian like him can kill people in a war he unleashes may be a question coming from the religious community of Trump backers, but sounds very naïve, not to say stupid when addressed to a head of state.
Perhaps the least professional part of the interview was the last 10 minutes when Carlson seemed to forget who he is and who is Putin, asking in the spirit of ‘just between us guys’ whether Putin would not be magnanimous and release that poor kid (age 32) journalist Evan Gershkovich who could not really have been doing espionage.
This morning’s BBC news program offered viewers about 1 minute from the interview in which Putin said Russia had no interest whatsoever in invading, in occupying the Baltic States, Poland or other NATO countries and that he could envisage a war with Poland only if Poland attacked Russia first. That was better than the total silence about the interview on Euronews and CNN, but it was very meager coverage of what should have been the number one media event of the day.
Curiously, the Financial Times this morning offered a three page article on the interview which reporters Max Seddon and Felicia Schwartz probably won from reluctant editors by taking as their lead those final minutes devoted to release of the imprisoned journalist Gershkovich. From there, at the two thirds mark they turned to other subjects from the interview relating to the start of the Ukraine war and the way Russia is being used by the US and its western allies “to intimidate their own population with an imaginary Russian threat,” a direct quote from Putin. At the same time the FT was not far from the mark in describing Putin’s performance as “a grab bag.”
In closing, I wish to share my impression of one dimension of the interview that surely few others will comment on: body language. Carlson was true to form, posing with a blank, puzzled face the whole time. However, there were flashes of Putin that we normally do not see, and they were not at all flattering. Perhaps it was barely contained annoyance with this pushy American, but Putin allowed himself to display arrogance that contradicted the modest composure we most commonly see. That will not win many friends for Russia.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024