Is it wrong for Tucker Carlson to interview Vladimir Putin?

In September, 1934, William Randolph Hearst, the most famous journalist and publisher in the world, visited Berlin and interviewed Adolf Hitler. At the time, Hearst admired Hitler, and was rather taken aback when the Fuhrer asked why he was so “misunderstood” in the English-language press. Hearst replied that Americans love democracy and distrusted dictatorships, to which Hitler answered that he had been democratically elected by a vast majority of Germans.

Unlike Hearst, Carlson does not think that his job is to talk to world leaders away from the cameras in order to decide what’s best for democracy

Hearst then said that Americans were concerned about the treatment of a certain unnamed minority. Hitler duly pointed out that Americans had mistreated Native Indian tribes and assured Hearst that Nazi discrimination was being curtailed. Hearst told Hitler that his public would be pleased. He was then surprised to be photographed with various Nazi leaders as part of what was obviously a press stunt for the Third Reich. “Visiting Hitler is like calling on the President of the United States,” he grumbled. “One doesn’t talk about it for publication.”

Journalism has changed a lot since in the 1930s, but that Hearst story is worth bearing in mind as self-righteous pundits queue up to denounce the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for visiting Moscow, apparently to interview Vladimir Putin.

Bill Kristol, the director of Defending Democracy Together, said, kidding on the square: “Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital who writes books about the awfulness of the Kremlin, said that Carlson is “either remarkably stupid or consciously evil.” “He’s not stupid,” replied John Harwood the former Wall Street Journal and CNN man.

Hearst has been rightly criticized for his favorable and gullible view of Nazism. But almost nobody at the time would have suggested that interviewing or speaking to Hitler was somehow in itself “evil” — back then people understood that journalism was not about good guys vs bad guys; rather it was about giving readers information and context.

Unlike Hearst, Carlson does not think that his job is to talk to world leaders away from the cameras in order to decide what’s best for democracy. He wants to interview Putin because that would be a scoop in and of itself — and since we have no shortage of pundits calling Putin Hitler, he’s interested in how the Russian leader thinks. He’s curious about the truth, in other words, which is what journalism is meant to be about, even if that makes him anathema to most important people.

Ah, say Carlson’s critics, but he’s a “Russia sympathizer” who will slobber all over Putin. Well, let’s wait and see on that. No doubt, unless Carlson calls Putin a murderer to his face and storms out of the interview in disgust, he will be widely branded as a “useful idiot.”

But that’s another point on which traditional journalism has become unhealthily detached from its purpose. Broadcast journalists, in particular, believe they must “push back” — which today means reacting negatively and emotionally — when dealing with controversial politicians, else they will be vilified for being soft or sycophantic. Interviewers feel unless they have skewered their subject they have somehow failed. Declining to challenge someone is seen as an endorsement.

That’s idiotic, of course, and makes news journalism ever more tedious — as pompous presenters insist on talking over their subjects and making themselves the center of attention.

Carlson tends not to do that. He is highly critical of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment — and far less hawkish on Russia and Iran than most of the successful current-affairs hosts, party-line hacks and dubiously funded think-tank-affiliated pundits who dominate the airwaves whenever war is in the news. But that doesn’t make him, as many people are desperate to claim, a Russian asset. It makes him a proper journalist. There’s not many of them around.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.