There's Nothing Wrong with Tucker Interviewing Putin. It's Called Journalism.

Nobody should ever apologize for interviewing a newsworthy personality

News broke earlier this month that long-time television personality and journalist Tucker Carlson would be interviewing Russian president Vladimir Putin as part of reporting that he’s doing during his first visit to the country. 

Predictably, the news was met with outrage across the media and pundit class.

CNN’s Erin Burnett derided Carlson as “one of the leaders of the MAGA GOP” and said he had gone “there as a Putin-supporting celebrity.” 

Another anchor at the channel, Abby Phillip called Carlson interviewing Putin a “Russian nesting doll,” leading her guest, former Obama confidante David Axelrod, to quip that when he first “heard he was there, I assumed he was there to get an award. There isn’t an American who has done more for Vladimir Putin than Tucker Carlson.”

A piece in the Daily Beast framed Carlson’s interview as serving Russian propagandists. Responding to Carlson’s trip to Russia, MSNBC’s Jen Psaki called him “just another far-right conspiracy peddler with a show on the Internet.” 

“He has to stay relevant somehow,” she smirked in the same segment.

Adam Kinzinger, who once served as a Republican in Congress but who today works as a contributor on CNN, went even further and called Carlson a “traitor”; neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol floated banning him from the United States.

It’s perfectly fair to criticize Carlson for the questions he asks — or doesn’t ask — to Putin during the interview. And Carlson went too far when claiming that other Western journalists haven’t tried to interview Putin; it’s a hard interview to get and it may be that Putin was more likely to agree to an interview with Carlson because of the latter’s staunch opposition to the American role in Ukraine.

But it’s unfair and even antithetical to the principles of journalism to smear Carlson for daring to interview Putin at all. 

Putin is one of the planet’s most influential people, a world leader who is engaged on one side of a conflict that the United States has spent billions of dollars in. If anything, more journalists should be trying to interview Putin and other world leaders who are on the other side of us on major issues; Americans need to be able to consider the views of countries besides our own, even if we have little to nothing in common. 

And despite today’s media climate where so many pundits think it’s anathema to meet with an antagonistic foreign leader, Carlson’s interview with Putin sits neatly in the American tradition of interviewing adversaries.

Here are some examples: