COMMENT
Dictators – especially those with a nuclear arsenal in their back pocket – do not generally like to be challenged or contradicted.
These men, and they are mostly men, have usually been surrounded for years by toadies, sycophants and mealy-mouthed counselors who have told them everything of what they wanted to hear, and nothing of what they didn’t.
It might then have come as a surprise when just such a despot offered to answer unscreened questions from an American interrogator and have the interview streamed unedited across the internet.
The risks might have appeared to be considerable and the upsides limited.
But when Vladimir Putin, Russia’s long-serving president, agreed to sit down with Tucker Carlson, one of the United States’ better-known talking heads, he knew, of course, exactly what he was doing.
Carlson – ahead of the interview – claimed grandiosely that it was his mission to cast light on a man that western journalists had neglected to. “Not a single western journalist has bothered to interview [Putin],” he said.
Instead, according to Carlson, the mainstream media had focussed exclusively and uncritically on Volodymyr Zelensky, the leader of Ukraine.
“The interviews that Zelensky has done in the United States are not traditional interviews. They are fawning pep sessions,” Carlson said. “That is not journalism, that is government propaganda of the ugliest kind, the kind that kills people.”