If Assange and Snowden can't come back, why cucker?
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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...
Why does the page have a “fairness” feedback meter, and how is enlightened centrism “factual and fair”?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
[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.
How long before he announces a Trump interview as well. Mule transporting information between Russians.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Carlson's work in Russia could see the former Fox News host in hot water with the EU, Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian Prime Minister and current member of the European Parliament, told Newsweek.
Explaining his motive for the interview, Carlson said in a video statement on Tuesday: "Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now."
If deemed sufficient, the EAS can then present the case to the European Council—the body made up of EU national leaders—which takes the final decision on whether to impose sanctions.
One European diplomatic official, who did not wish to be named as they were not authorized to speak publicly, told Newsweek that any future travel restrictions would likely require proof that he is linked to Moscow's aggression, something that "is absent or hard to prove."
The content of Carlson's interview with Putin is not yet clear but, given the pundit's long-time defense of aspects of Russian policy, critics expect it to be sympathetic to Moscow.
"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.
The original article contains 765 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I have followed 'news' from Russian outlets such as RT and Sputnik, being recast as Right wing talking points within hours. This is not just recent, it has been going on for years. Hamilton68 documents examples. The parallels of this propaganda being sown to the lies dispensed to Ukraine to sow dissention is obvious. It is a cheap warfare, and it works. Tucker was and is in the trade of packaging Russian propaganda as news. He should be labeled as such. Carlson was discredited and fired by Fox. Spreading lies, admitting to doing so on archived tapes, and iirc, sexual harassment was in his part of the discovery on Fox's $780M settlement. In short, Tucker Carlson is on record for knowingly spreading lies, for personal monetary benefit. This is more of the same. I hope every person watches Carlson, knowing that Carlson reports what enriches him, not truth. Carlson has a transparent agenda. The unanswered question is who pays Carlson. That will be obvious by who's boots that Carlson's reports shine.
Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
My favorite thing about the interview is when he literally told Putin to "shut the fuck up and get back to the script" when he started talking about the Nazis being bad. Like shit man, if you didn't have the soft power you had I don't think you'd be leaving Russia after that one.
It was wild in general seeing Putin as not being the most wicked man in the room, which isn't hard when the other person is probably one of the most notorious neo-nazi propagandists in America who literally quit their golden job because they asked him to hide the racism a bit better.
It’s amazing what lengths Carlson goes to in order to stay relevant. Sad, really.