America This Week, February 7, 2024: "The Destruction of Journalism"

I feel like I'm regarding the news from a safe distance.

It's not radioactive. And boy, boy, are things radioactive this week. It's like we're in this continual nuclear shit cloud of nonsense that just keeps expanding. Like, I mean, the ripples from it this week with this Tucker Carlson thing. It's like nothing.

I can't even, I can't even begin to explain how I, how ridiculous the whole thing is. But boy, are people taking it seriously?

Now, the commentary is about, you know. Our vulnerability to what may happen, and I'm not sure what. the fear is exactly that that Putin will say something so devastatingly viral that people will have no ability to resist it, no ability to check it.

Or is it just the mere fact that an American would, at a time of war, even though it's not a war in any official sense, go across, quote, enemy lines, talk to the other leader? I mean, we've done it before. Other journalists have interviewed Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, you know, Putin himself numerous times. But this time it's different.

Then we have, let's see, Bill Browder. Now. I know Bill Browder. I was in Moscow at the same time as Bill Browder. And Bill Browder is not a fan of Vladimir Putin's for probably some pretty good reasons.

But he also got ridiculously rich thanks to another Russian autocrat, Boris Yeltsin, because he was involved in a deal to get Sibneft funds way below market and basically just cash those in. So he's grateful for one Russian autocrat and very angry at another.

Then there's this, which is just amazing. This is Ann Applebaum. Now, we can talk about what exactly Ann Applebaum is.

She's something between a journalist and a deeply connected person. But she does do journalism. So we'll just call her that.

But she writes this piece, The American Face of Authoritarian Propaganda. This is before, as you know, as of this broadcast, nothing's happened yet. But for Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson fills a need. And this is how it starts. Axis Sally was the generic name for women with husky voices and good English who read German and Italian propaganda on the radio during World War II.

I mean, he's Axis Sally now.

This hasn't even happened yet. And all it is is an interview. It's like a collective cry for help or something. What is this exactly?

And to go through their, you know, reasonably, through their objections to this thing is, I think, to destroy all their rationales.

You should not hear the voice of your, let's call him enemy. Is that the new axiom? that to I mean, Putin can be heard anywhere. He, you know, if you want to dial up Putin's speeches on the Internet, you can hear them. They haven't, you know, completely silenced them.

Browder was saying that, you know, his work and his PR work in Moscow, for Putin is going to cost the world far more than seven hundred and eighty seven million dollars. And I was like, what is he? what is he talking about? like the is, what's the damage that they're assessing?

And Browder right there said he wishes people would stop calling Tucker a journalist because journalists are object. Well, first of all, that's not true. Journalists are all kinds of things. Some pretend to objectivity and others are not. I don't.

But, but I would think that it would be better to have Putin asked questions and then, you know.

Those questions should be followed up than it is to. just, you know, show a speech of his in which everybody's clapping. I mean, like I say, I imagine that Tucker Carlson.

Well, we'll press this person to some extent. I don't think he went all that way to just become a receptacle for propaganda. And I expect he'll. he'll get it, get near full propaganda. Why wouldn't he?

We get it from our leaders. I'm sure Putin is very good at it as an ex-KGB agent. But we have the ability now, with the World Wide Web and social media, to check every one of his, to check them exhaustively. And they will be checked exhaustively by everyone from, you know, these misinformation councils to the average citizen. So are we not better armed for this than we've ever been in the past?

I think they want to be able to access it, just like everybody else. But there's this mystical other person out there for whom this is extremely dangerous. And, you know, Tucker may very well press Putin on a few things. Putin is also, for anyone who's watched him, he's so used to being not challenged that he will say the incautious thing on, you know, more than occasionally. He says things that are nuts sometimes or show a side of him.

that is, you know, maybe not calculated. He'll say things that are very, you know, viral and quotable. I mean, I remember when I was there, he was talking about how we're going to go whack Chechens in the outhouse.

You know, he was using a mobster term. He has that tendency to slide in and out of cautiousness. So any interview with him can be interesting, just from an informational standpoint. Why wouldn't you want to get this? Even people who don't like him, and, you know, there are lots of reasons not to like Vladimir Putin, they should be interested in this at this moment.

But he's probably also going to get some digs in at the United States. And there are probably going to be some that will be circulated by people here in the U.S. And what are we worried about there? I mean, they should be asking themselves, why would that resonate? Why would something Vladimir Putin says resonate in America?

And I think the reason is because people are tired of being told what they can and cannot listen to.

You're not used to it. You don't know his tricks. You haven't heard his tropes and his, you know, his usual lines on things. So this will be the first time that a lot of Americans, and young Americans particularly, hear from Vladimir Putin. But it's not, but but it's not because, and it's but it's because we haven't allowed him to speak.

So, you know, maybe this is, maybe this is a lesson to these people that that that you can't completely frame the situation in advance without leaving room for your apple cart to be upset rather easily.

Who doesn't understand that that principle? I mean, it's, it's. it's one of the basic principles of media.

And now they, and now and now they're absolutely terrified that, having covered up Elvis from the hips down, we're going to see his hips and we won't be able to handle it, you know,

If you just don't make a big deal about something, it just it disappears instantly into the ether. People forget it in a second. But they've made sure that this is going to be the most consequential interview of the year. And the reasons for that are mysterious for a number of reasons, among other things, he's been interviewed by other people. And also, we have this long tradition in the United States of interviewing, you know, so-called hostile, adversarial figures, and this being a big boon for journalism.

I mean, we. we can show some of the examples in a bit. But just to go back, I mean, from the, you know, the famous 60 Minutes interview of the Ayatollah in the middle of a hostage crisis, I mean, think about that, think about an American journalist going to interview the Ayatollah while there are hostages sitting in, you know, in an Iranian embassy. This is crazy. There's nothing compared to this.

Brokaw interviewing Gorbachev in the middle of the cold, at the peak of the Cold War and the Rambo era, right? I don't know what other examples come to mind, Walter, for you. I mean, like. there are so many of these.

Now, would we not allow Putin to address the United Nations? I'm not sure why. Maybe he's chosen not to recently. But in any case, seeing our enemies has never, that I can think of, caused us to run to the side of our enemy. I can't think of one example of it.

I mean, yeah, I mean, you're right. There are some people who are comparing him to Hanoi Jane, people who in many cases, I think, liked Hanoi Jane back when and then bought her workout video later, but now are, you know, retconning the whole thing to make it seem like all of America hated Hanoi Jane. Well, there were many people in the salons of the Upper West Side and, you know, and Santa Monica and so on, who continue to think of that as some kind of wonderful crossing of a demilitarized zone in order to, you know, see the enemy. But this isn't Hanoi Jane. This isn't Axis Sally.

This isn't Trump. I mean, this isn't Tucker giving a speech. It's Tucker conducting an interview. So, I mean, it's a silly comparison on its face. And to see these people of such power and high education, I mean, and Obama's educated, if nothing else, making these silly, vapid comparisons in order to sort of prejudice us against what might happen.

And now, Matt, I'm really wondering, when it does happen, what will be its path through the American media? You know, they won't even show, MSNBC, won't even show Trump's speeches.

Think of the crazy stuff that's happened just in the time since we've been doing this show. I mean, the idea that you can go in and prevent, look, you can't see Russian media now. Like, if you go online and try to look up any Russian news, it's a real hassle to, you know, even get a secondhand version of a reprint of anything. And, you know, we have Europe cutting off our key and Sputnik. And it's like we've done the same thing that the Soviets did with us, which is create this aura of mystique and inaccessibility around this foreign news camera.

Just let them do it. It's not going to change the minds of ordinary Americans unless you happen to be so out of touch with what's going on with people that you're afraid of your own ability to convince.

Unless he has a very good double and uses it this time. So that's out the window. What other things have they said about Putin that won't survive the merest interaction with Tucker Carlson?

that there was pressure applied to Ukraine to back out of that deal, people aren't going to like that. That's been kind of expunged from our history. We don't really read about that. This is all the stuff. that's kind of stuff that people like John Mearsheimer talked about.

just brainless aggressor, because Hitler, by the way, did come across as one, right?

Putin is going to speak via Carlson to the American people. And he's going to speak in a measured way, I expect. We're not enemies will be the basic message. And he will also say, you've been lied to about me and about my country. And that's inevitable, right?

Now, skilled KGB propagandist that he is, I'm not going to weigh in on the truthfulness or, you know, veracity of anything that Putin might say. But I will tell you that the tone of it is going to be, hey, captive people, almost like he's speaking the way the voice of America used to broadcast, you know, Eastern Europe. Hey, people, you don't get the full picture. I'm your leaders, your elites. keep you from seeing it.

And this is my chance to talk directly to you. And I'm going to do it. What a horrible position we put ourselves in, that that should have even a slight ring of truth to it.

I mean,

Putin was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. when I, when I lived there a million years ago. My friends used to cover his, he would use stuff to fill in for the mayor, for the mayor. when the mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, wasn't there.

And everybody used to hate him. They thought he was this nebbishy, boring guy who interfered with, who didn't give good answers. So the press corps used to hate Putin back in the day. But when he ascended to the national scene, he was kind of like a remarkable villainous character. I mean, one of his first big public deals was the airing of a sex tape.

involving a prosecutor who was going after Boris Yeltsin,

this guy who was courting with prostitutes. And he came across as this very scary,

you know, very hardcore, tough guy, kind of like a, almost like an alter ego to Yeltsin, who was a bumbling, you know, comical drunk. But he's managed to transform himself since that time, since that initial introduction, into a kind of a very canny media operator who is taking advantage of all of the weaknesses of American media. He is very attentive to what we say on the air, because that was once his job as a KGB agent in East Germany, was monitoring how we talk to ourselves. And he's doing the same thing now. It's just, and we've made it easy for him.

I'm not going to get too personal, Matt, but your father's a journalist.

Tucker's father was someone who broadcast to captive people. Now here, the son is doing his version of that. Only the broadcast signal is being reversed and coming back to America.

Your media is holding you hostage and keeping you in the dark. I'm doing this not to convince you of anything, but simply to penetrate that veil. Yeah, he's, at least in his rationale for this interview, he's acting very much like a Cold War. American would have acted toward an Eastern European audience.

Uh, that.