By Ron Paul, MD
February 13, 2024
There has been much written and said about Tucker Carlson's interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. As of this writing the video on Twitter alone has been viewed nearly 200 million times, making it likely the most-viewed news event in history.
Many millions of viewers who may not have had access to the other side of the story were informed that the Russia/Ukraine military conflict did not begin in 2022, as the mainstream media continuously reports, but in fact began eight years earlier with a US-backed coup in Ukraine. The US media does not report this because they don't want Americans to begin questioning our interventionist foreign policy. They don't want Americans to see that our government meddling in the affairs of other countries - whether by "color revolution," sanctions, or bombs - has real and deadly consequences to those on the receiving end of our foreign policy.
To me, however, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin was the US mainstream media reaction. As Putin himself said during the interview, "in the world of propaganda, it's very difficult to defeat the United States." Even a casual look at the US mainstream media's reporting before and after the interview would show how correct he is about that. In the days and weeks before the interview, the US media was filled with stories about how horrible it was that Tucker Carlson was interviewing the Russian president. There was the danger, they all said, that Putin might spread "disinformation."
That Putin might say something to put his country in a better light was, they were saying, reason enough to not interview him. With that logic, why have journalism at all? Everyone interviewed by journalists - certainly every world leader - will attempt to paint a rosy picture. The job of a journalist in a free society should be to do the reporting and let the people decide. But somehow that has been lost. These days the mainstream media tells you what to think and you better not dispute it or you will be cancelled!
What the US mainstream media was really worried about was that the "other side of the story" might start to ring true with the public. So they attacked the messenger.
The CNN reporting on Tucker's interview pretty much sums up the reaction across the board of the US mainstream media. Their headline read, "Tucker Carlson is in Russia to interview Putin. He's already doing the bidding of the Kremlin."
By merely doing what used to be called "journalism" - interviewing and reporting on people and events, whether good or bad - one is "doing the bidding" of the subject of the interview or report?
No wonder fellow journalist Julian Assange has been locked away in a gulag for so many years. He dared to assume that in a free society, being a journalist means reporting the good, the bad, and the ugly even if it puts those in power in a bad light.
In the end, the massive success of the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin demonstrates once and for all that the American people are sick to death of their mainstream media propagandists and liars. They are looking not for government narratives, but for truth. That's the really good news about this interview.