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Tucker Carlson Could Face Sanctions Over Putin Interview
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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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.
Tucker isn't a journalist, he's an entertainer, or at least, a propagandist.
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.
Tucker is one of the people helping delegitimize the press.
I didn't say anything about persecuting
The right-wing is able to complain about the "mainstream media" and "fake news" precisely because there's a grain of truth there. The news has gotten more corporate, less trustworthy, more biased, and less reliable over the past 50 years. People don't trust the news, rightly so. Fox News is part of that, they are the most egregious offender in many ways, but they are not the root of the issue.
And trying to sanction Tucker? Using the government? Boy does it play into that narrative well. Tucker is praying that he gets sanctioned because that would totally validate the "I'm being censored as a conservative" victim persecution fetish that maga has
The corporatization of the news media literally started with Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes who eventually found Rupert Murdoch to fund their vision with Fox News.
You know why they wanted to start their own media organization? Because they didn't like public broadcasting, the organization for public broadcasting, the organization created by Lyndon B Johnson and Congress to fund public media (which helps fund NPR and PBS). They thought that public broadcasting would favor Democrats too much (you know that whole the truth has a liberal bias thing). So they decided to create a media organization in which they could control the narrative instead of letting independent journalists do their job.
It took until 1996 for them to get everything together with Rupert Murdoch and the rest is history. The corporatization of other media outlets was in direct response to how Fox News ran their business because they cared more about ratings and making money than actual journalism, which caused the other news media organizations to follow suit.
So you could very much make the argument that Fox News was the root of the issue, depending on how you look at it. You can either say Fox News ruined the atmosphere around journalism and they started the backslide on the slippery slope, or you can argue that it was an inevitable outcome of deregulation. It becomes a philosophical argument at that point.
Do you know why Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996? Because on January 3, 1996 the Telecommunications act of 1996 was enacted. This completely deregulated the American media market and led to market concentration and is the reason corporations like Sinclair now reach 39% of the American market. (The max reach they are legally allowed to have). Murdoch announced Fox News less than a month later on January 31st, 1996 before Clinton had even signed the bill into law.
So even if you think the outcome was inevitable, Fox News certainly jumped on it faster than anyone else and were the ones to start the enshittification of news media.
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.
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.
Yes, but to equate it to the below is a false equivalence.
Hmmm. I'm not sure recent history bears that out, at least with regard to US politics.
Not sure. But that doesn't mean there isn't one, nor that it can't be apparent when it's been crossed.
The EU has good reason to fear anything that emboldens Putin or works in even the slightest to increase his chances of prevailing in Ukraine. It's quite clear that a victorious Russia is an existential threat to its neighbors. With all this discernment of fact that's going on, it seems like that should be fairly easy to understand.
How is this not exactly that?
To my knowledge he's not being prevented from sharing his beliefs, nor has the interview been banned, nor has he been imprisoned for any of this. Where's the censorship?
The title of the article: Tucker Carlson Could Face Sanctions Over Putin Interview. They're not talking about Facebook refusing to host the video. They're talking about the EU government doing something about the fact that he interviewed Putin.
I read that. And I read the rest of the article, where they were very vague about what those might be aside from travel restrictions, said it could be a long time before anything happens if at all, and that the folks trying to do this don't have the power to do it alone.
Consider that optics matter just as much as the actual content of the sanctions. Even if it's basically a nothingburger of travel restrictions, he will play this up to his audience as being persecuted by The Establishment for speaking truth to power.
In other words, they're giving him what he wants. Or do you think he interviewed Putin just for fun? Or because he really likes him?
Was the US dropping a nuke on Hiroshima a war crime? Or Firebombing entire cities? Unfortunately, "war crimes", while they have a clear international definition, tend to only apply to whoever loses wars. That's why the US passed a law requiring military intervention if the ICC tried to arrest an American general.
Here's Robert McNamara, US Defense Secretary during the Vietnam war, answering that question: "LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He... and I'd say I... were behaving as war criminals"
Should we ban his books? Sanction people for interviewing him? If we did, we wouldn't have had that gem of a quote. That entire documentary, mostly composed of interviews of McNamara, is a powerful testament to the dangers of war for humanity. We don't want a situation where journalists are scared to interview people because of what the government might do to them in response.
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.