If Assange and Snowden can’t come back, why cucker?
I always love how quickly the liberal mask falls off. The west is all about freedom, democracy, and free speech, until it’s something the lib mainstream doesn’t like to hear. It’s quite telling you’re not asking why Assange and Snowden are being prosecuted for revealing what they revealed, but you’re upset that this isn’t happening more.
Turns out that those who label Communists as tankies and authoritarians are well-aware of the necessity to suppress divergent viewpoints. Freedom of expression is limited to ideas that align with the liberal narrative; when faced with opinions they deem detrimental, liberals demand cancellation, imprisonment, or even death for the proponents.
The real disagreement liberals have with the Communists is over what set of ideas has merit. When liberals screech about authoritarianism what they’re really saying is that it’s their ideology that’s being suppressed.
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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.
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.
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?
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?
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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.
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.
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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…
Main difference is that one is an evil war criminal while the other is a “good” war criminal
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
Well, what do you know? Apparently the New York Times, the New Yorker, CNN and Newsweek are all far left:
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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.
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🤣
*should
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That should tell you what America’s goals ultimately are.
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.
How long before he announces a Trump interview as well. Mule transporting information between Russians.
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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
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MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
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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!
It’s amazing what lengths Carlson goes to in order to stay relevant. Sad, really.
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.
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