like i don’t give a shit about tuck but in what reality is simply talking to the “enemy” some kind of punishable offense. y’all supposed to be all about free press, are they not free to speak to bad people?
When Russia has repeatedly denied requests from other journalists in the past, I don’t think that you can really associate Carlson with being “free press”. This is a business deal, not journalism. How should we treat people who engage in business deals with sanctioned individuals?
“Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? It’s absurd – we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now,” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
The BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, wrote on X: “Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that ‘no western journalist has bothered to interview’ Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”
Yevgenia Albats, a Russian journalist and author of a book about the KGB, described Mr Carlson’s claim as “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 $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow,” she wrote on X.
“Press” has always been a business. This isn’t the dunk you think it is. They have always dealt with and interviewed sanctioned individuals. Some even interview prisoners! Imagine, interviewing not just somebody accused of breaking the law, but somebody convicted of it, like Mandela! What should we do with those journalists? According to some people on this thread:
Putin is as far as one can get from Mandela.
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Your three sources are all undeniable propaganda. If you don’t think Tucker Carlson is a serious journalist, that’s perfectly understandable, but surely even the bottom of the barrel is more serious than the literal agents of the governments you’re at war with? If I was Putin, I’d also turn down the literal BBC. Libs are so up their own ego they can’t imagine someone not wanting to be filtered through their state’s propaganda apparatus.
Actually I kind of think the whole “get all precious about free speech” thing is kind of played out and mostly right wing bullshit anyhow
yeah but catching libs in a bind about it when 60% of their ideology is malding at hypocrisy is kinda funny
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noooo dont just compare things stop thats not fair
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In authoritarian bad country, professional bowtie journalists spread racist hatred to cause dissent among the impoverished for the sake of the elite ruling class, but they are forbidden from speaking to foreign enemies
It’s always projection. 100%. All the time. It never ends.
Why does the page have a “fairness” feedback meter, and how is enlightened centrism “factual and fair”?
The more opinions you have the more biased you are, thus sitting on your ass and accepting the status quo is the purest form of thinking possible.
Because question-begging centrism is all that any of these really are
Enlightened centrism has exactly 57 miligrams of fairness which is the recommended daily dose for adults. Your health will suffer if you get too much or too little fairness.
Bringing balance to the Force was a lie. The Jedi played us for fools. Execute Order 66. Palpatine did nothing wrong.
All of these media bias meters seem to have the same approach: only centrism is factual. What if reality is not the way the “centre” understands it?
Check out these dumb-ass media bias graphs. I swear most Americans have potato media literacy.
Folks, please go read Manufacturing Consent, or better still Inventing Reality. A five-minute primer: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Well, what do you know? Apparently the New York Times, the New Yorker, CNN and Newsweek are all far left:
Freedom of the press and protection of journalists in the West. If he went to talk to Netanyahu no one would have minded.
Too true. Our Media publishes all of Israels lies on the front page with a tiny quote that attributes it to the IDF.
They repeat those lies over multiple articles. And they keep quoting those lies. Over and over.
But one interview with Putin is a line too far…
Main difference is that one is an evil war criminal while the other is a “good” war criminal
Tucker Carlson is a fascist prick but this is ridiculous. He interviewed a guy and made it public. He did basic journalism. It might not be good journalism and it might be biased against the official party line but it is not like he has shot up an Ukrainian orphanage or something.
Tucker spouting white supremacist homophobic transphobic speech
EU sleeps
Tucker flies to the EU or Russia to talk to another right winger about the weather or some shit
EU freak out
Really lets you know what their priorities are.
By EU standards, Putin is basically a centrist…
If Assange and Snowden can’t come back, why cucker?
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I’m not. But if we only did it to tucker I wouldn’t even look twice.
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Ok. I thought you “did not know.”
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Yes, and my post was a joke but you read it like an executive order.
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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.
Jailing or sanctioning journalists and critics is some shit Putin and other despots do, let’s not emulate him.
Let’s not pretend that whichever western states are included in “us” here aren’t similarly despotic. It makes little difference whether you kill the journalist yourself or have a dog like Israel do it and then cover for them.
I would stand with anybody who is sanctioned by the government for their speech regardless of how much I disagree with it.
Hate speech is bad and dying on the hill that people should be able to advocate for genocide is nothing but useful idiocy for fascists.
None of this is especially relevant to the particulars of this case, obviously Putin has mostly rather banal things to say, because it’s either a: correct, b: wretchedly chauvinist in a way that Republicans agree with (e.g. homophobia), or c: that weird revanchist shit that doesn’t mean anything. I just think your ideology is intellectually and practically suicidal and wanted to comment on part of it.
Yeah Tucker should have been thrown off the air years ago for hate speech, not just talking to a Russian. Talking to Putin is nothing compared to the years of transphobic racist drivel he’s spewed. It’s such a clear bias in what free press in America actually entails.
Dude spouted great replacement theory on his fucking show! Any government or party serious about stopping fascism would have jailed him over that
I agree with you in part, but:
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.
Free speech is also allowing a massive, astroturfed campaign to spread transphobia. The people with the most money have the loudest voices, and printing sensationalist bigotry to provoke fear, anger, and hate gets the clicks which makes more money.
What makes it especially terrifying, and I’m speaking from personal experience, is that you don’t know who’s on the other side of the screen. Most people in the target audience will just get a little pissy and keep clicking headlines (and voting to take away rights), but there’s also people who are unstable, whether due to drugs or psychological issues or simply being too deep into the narrative. When you have for example far-right media outlets saying trans people are pedophiles, and more mainstream sources validating that perspective in not so many words, and that’s being broadcast to some meth head watching hours on end every day, then I’m not really a fan of that speech being free.
Just last weekend, for instance, some queer friends and I were threatened by an unstable person with a metal pipe just walking down the street, idk how much the media plays into that but I also had a family member who did what I described above, shooting up meth and watching shit like OAN all day every day. And even regular people who watch too much cable news, and it doesn’t even matter that much what they watch, if you try to reason with them, no matter how much sense you make or what facts you have on your side, it’s one conversation vs all the time they’ve spent watching the news - I like to compare it to trying to win an argument when the other side gets to say 100 words (or more) every time you say 1. In this way, good ideas don’t always win in the marketplace of ideas.
But yeah I agree with your overall point, sanctioning someone for interviewing a world leader is some bullshit, fuck Tucker Carlson but it’s always important to understand rival geopolitical powers.
This instance of an unstable person consuming content online and then and going to hurt people in real life is scary, but I’d propose that maybe unstable people who hurt people based on what they read are kind of inevitably going to end up on that trajectory regardless of the freedom of our speech spaces. And that maybe it’s not worth sacrificing the free speech of all people simply because a few people are going to do bad things, even if that speech in part motivated them.
What you’re describing where people end up in their own media bubble is exactly why we need more open access to speech and free, neutral platforms for people to have these kinds of discussions on. There is a major push in society for everybody to splinter off into spaces where everybody agrees with them and, idk, that’s exactly what happens to people when they go down the quanon/OAN/etc rabbit hole. We have lost to many “third spaces” in public where we might have these kinds of discussions and everybody keeps getting more polarized.
The problem with hate speech the last 10 years has much more to do with the “I get in 1 word, they get in 100” problem than anything else. When you get into where people get their news, social media is a big part of that puzzle and Facebook et al has been able to put their thumb on the scale in a major way to spread hateful divisive content. Nazis has access to the internet in the 90s and 2000s, but they were in their own little bubbles and couldn’t do a whole lot. It’s social media that gave them a real platform by incentivizing their content and choosing, algorithmically, to promote posts which got “engagement”. Likes are engagement, angry reacts are engagement, comments are engagement. Reddit had a decent system with incentivizing upvotes, but incentivizing all engagement? You get civil wars. Not only did this incentivization mechanism make divisive content more likely to show up in people’s feeds, but it created a financial incentive for those posters to make divisive content and it made Facebook’s bottom line predicated on divisive content.
People are scared of the spread of hate speech and the right in the right wing it’s causing and they are ready to throw “free speech” as a concept out because they are so afraid of it. We don’t need to do that. What we need to do is take away the power social media companies have to influence the types and quantity of information we receive. If we do that, online hate speech will retreat back into it’s little bubble and it will be a thing 1% of people hear and get influenced by, not 30%. Luckily, I think this is already happening. Fedi is a good move in this direction.
but I’d propose that maybe unstable people who hurt people based on what they read are kind of inevitably going to end up on that trajectory regardless of the freedom of our speech spaces
You say that, but do you have any evidence for it? Are we just going to brush off the mentally unwell people that cults like QAnon prey upon as being a lost cause? As being people who would just be violent because the seeds of sin in their souls compel them to? You’re just arguing for a secularized version of Calvinism that is even more reliant on faith because it lacks the element of theological reasoning.
And that maybe it’s not worth sacrificing the free speech of all people simply because a few people are going to do bad things
Maybe this obfuscates relevant factors, like how money controls media and it’s not just a matter of private citizens vs other private citizens.
What you’re describing where people end up in their own media bubble is exactly why we need more open access to speech
It takes more of an argument than you have so far put forward to prove this, though I agree with you in a way that I suspect you would reject. Specifically, the blackballing of journalists and other sources who provide more useful explanations than exist in mainstream American Discourse is definitely part of the reason people resort to cults.
That said, if we are discounting questions like Class consciousness, your thesis falls apart entirely. These bubbles are largely self-selecting, based on marketing algorithms for the consumer-lifestyle brands that you call American politics. There is nothing stopping a brain-rotted Twitter Q freak from going on some socdem hive on Reddit, but they don’t want to and they have been encouraged to this mindset by various forms of conditioning on the multi-billion dollar skinner boxes that are social media platforms. Of course, there are less polarized spaces and ones designed for “open debate” (and again Reddit provides an excellent example of these empty gestures) but overwhelmingly what we see there is more tribalism, just with a different set of etiquette.
This shows one of the many significant failures of idealist fetishization of open society: People only have so much time and effort to put into research, especially more nebulous ideological subjects. Ideology is first and foremost a survival strategy, and people will budget their finite resources based on what they are able to project as best serving them from the limited information they operate within, starting from environments that are overwhelmingly controlled by the rich in neoliberal societies. You already have your goddam Marketplace of Idea and it has failed.
free, neutral platforms for people to have these kinds of discussions on.
Neutrality doesn’t exist and the bodies that claim to be neutral are just question-begging their own ideology.
Some people used to think that the internet would end war, but they were operating on a type of idealism similar to your own.
Is the tendency for devisive content to be promoted a quirk of certain social media platforms, or is something more inherent? I’d argue that people are more likely to click on something if it presents a message of, “You are under attack!!” as opposed to say, “Firefighter rescues kitten from tree!” because the former invokes more and more powerful emotions. Brains are designed to seek out and pay attention to threats, and I think even something like a print newspaper is going to be subject to that incentive, at least to a degree.
The other question I have is:
What we need to do is take away the power social media companies have to influence the types and quantity of information we receive.
Do you mean through state regulation, or just consumer choice?
Is the tendency for devisive content to be promoted a quirk of certain social media platforms, or is something more inherent? I’d argue that people are more likely to click on something if it presents a message of, “You are under attack!!” as opposed to say, “Firefighter rescues kitten from tree!” because the former invokes more and more powerful emotions. Brains are designed to seek out and pay attention to threats, and I think even something like a print newspaper is going to be subject to that incentive, at least to a degree.
You’re right. And it’s both. But social media has greatly accelerated our ability to exploit/be vulnerable to that quirk of the human brain. Specifically, the promotion of content based on interaction alone is the problem. It’s a policy choice by social media companies that has disastrous consequences for humanity.
Do you mean through state regulation, or just consumer choice?
Consumer choice and divestment. Brands are pulling out of Twitter, we need more of that from Meta and for them and/or consumers to recognize the dangers of using that platform. Consciousness-raising etc. People are recognizing the dangers of social media and centralization of the public square (though they may not use those terms), these platforms are hemorrhaging users, things are moving in the right direction. Musk and Spez are the best promoters of the fediverse we could ask for. And we need platforms like Fedi to mature and capture that audience. I think there’s a balancing act here to make sure we have safe online spaces for people to participate in (that are federated) while allowing the expression of a diversity of viewpoints so we don’t continue down the rabbit hole of polarization. One of the big problems with online public squares is the inability to tell intentions of commenters ie is that person genuinely “just asking questions” or is this a troll attempt? Reputation systems may help with this.
State regulation of this area is really tricky, all the proposals I’ve seen so far are pretty ripe for abuse by the government and I don’t want to give them that kind of power. They also make it harder for smaller sites and federations to exist since regulatory burdens limit who can run social media sites to only companies with money to pay lawyers.
I suppose time will tell whether that trend will grow to the point of being really significant. I don’t really trust the state as it stands to regulate speech in my interests. I do still believe in deplatforming hate speech when possible, and I don’t really see the marketplace of ideas as being reliable due to certain ideas having stronger signals, either from monetary backing or grabbing attention. As things stand though, I don’t really have a better answer than just personally using the fediverse over big social media sites.
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.
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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.
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Or Winston “I am highly in favor of using poison gas on uncivilized tribes” Churchill
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Dam its starting to sound like we just need to get rid of all private press
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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.
There’s not an argument about the danger of platforming here, because his power doesn’t come from a media position. He’s the head of a State. His power is self sustaining, and is going to exist regardless if he’s interviewed or not.
I’m sure Tucker is going to do a shitty, glazing interview, but that’s pretty regular for him.
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.
George Bush is considered by many to be a war criminal
Yes, but to equate it to the below is a false equivalence.
“First of all, it should be remembered that Putin is not just a president of an aggressor country, but he is wanted by the International Criminal Court and accused of genocide and war crimes,” MEP Urmas Paet, who previously served as Estonia’s foreign minister, told Newsweek.
we being free people can discern fact from fiction
Hmmm. I’m not sure recent history bears that out, at least with regard to US politics.
Where, exactly, should the line be draw then between “reporting” and “being a mouthpiece”.
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.
push for platforms to not give airtime to hacks like Tucker.
How is this not exactly that?
The easier solution is to not grant the government that kind of censorship power,
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?
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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?
The so-called “state of Israel” is blatantly violating an ICJ order to cease their ongoing genocide in Palestine. Should it be illegal to interview Benyamin Netanyahu?
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.
I know this is obvious but it’s so disheartening seeing the right monopolizing aspects of communist rhetoric just due to the amount of capital giving it a massive platform.
Eagerly awaiting the EU to sanction all US aligned propagandists as well…
Oh wait that will never happen
I think it’s so funny people are having long debates in this comment section and it’s essentially just saying a wealthy guy may or may not be able to fly to the EU because he did something.
Literally nothing has happened and I gotta read 87 paragraphs about whether I should be a free speech absolutist or not,
Is Dr Manhattan’s power stored in his glutes? wtf
I like that people are having the discussion, I also like that I skipped it.
I doubt anything will come of this, it’s just an interview, probably just some big talk from people in EU parliament, I guess Russia did the exact same thing when they sanctioned Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, but I would be surprised if the EU stoops to that level, it’s frankly petty to target private citizens doing media stuff regardless of what it is or how much you disagree with it.
but I would be surprised if the EU stoops to that level, it’s frankly petty to target private citizens doing media stuff regardless of what it is or how much you disagree with it.
“Am I a joke to you?”
- Jullian Assange
[I got a bot to automatically delete all my comments over 1 month old so you can’t see this comment anymore]
That should tell you what America’s goals ultimately are.
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Tucker should be sanctioned for being a bowtie wearing shit eating reactionary named “Tucker” first and foremost.
Facts
