When Russia has repeatedly denied requests from other journalists in the past, I don't think that you can really associate Carlson with being "free press". This is a business deal, not journalism. How should we treat people who engage in business deals with sanctioned individuals?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-vladimir-putin-interview-b2492192.html

“Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? It’s absurd – we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now,” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

The BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, wrote on X: “Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that ‘no western journalist has bothered to interview’ Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”

Yevgenia Albats, a Russian journalist and author of a book about the KGB, described Mr Carlson’s claim as “unbelievable”.

“I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow,” she wrote on X.

The more opinions you have the more biased you are, thus sitting on your ass and accepting the status quo is the purest form of thinking possible.

Because question-begging centrism is all that any of these really are

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...

Jailing or sanctioning journalists and critics is some shit Putin and other despots do, let's not emulate him.

Let's not pretend that whichever western states are included in "us" here aren't similarly despotic. It makes little difference whether you kill the journalist yourself or have a dog like Israel do it and then cover for them.

I would stand with anybody who is sanctioned by the government for their speech regardless of how much I disagree with it.

Hate speech is bad and dying on the hill that people should be able to advocate for genocide is nothing but useful idiocy for fascists.

None of this is especially relevant to the particulars of this case, obviously Putin has mostly rather banal things to say, because it's either a: correct, b: wretchedly chauvinist in a way that Republicans agree with (e.g. homophobia), or c: that weird revanchist shit that doesn't mean anything. I just think your ideology is intellectually and practically suicidal and wanted to comment on part of it.

I agree with you in part, but:

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.

Free speech is also allowing a massive, astroturfed campaign to spread transphobia. The people with the most money have the loudest voices, and printing sensationalist bigotry to provoke fear, anger, and hate gets the clicks which makes more money.

What makes it especially terrifying, and I'm speaking from personal experience, is that you don't know who's on the other side of the screen. Most people in the target audience will just get a little pissy and keep clicking headlines (and voting to take away rights), but there's also people who are unstable, whether due to drugs or psychological issues or simply being too deep into the narrative. When you have for example far-right media outlets saying trans people are pedophiles, and more mainstream sources validating that perspective in not so many words, and that's being broadcast to some meth head watching hours on end every day, then I'm not really a fan of that speech being free.

Just last weekend, for instance, some queer friends and I were threatened by an unstable person with a metal pipe just walking down the street, idk how much the media plays into that but I also had a family member who did what I described above, shooting up meth and watching shit like OAN all day every day. And even regular people who watch too much cable news, and it doesn't even matter that much what they watch, if you try to reason with them, no matter how much sense you make or what facts you have on your side, it's one conversation vs all the time they've spent watching the news - I like to compare it to trying to win an argument when the other side gets to say 100 words (or more) every time you say 1. In this way, good ideas don't always win in the marketplace of ideas.

But yeah I agree with your overall point, sanctioning someone for interviewing a world leader is some bullshit, fuck Tucker Carlson but it's always important to understand rival geopolitical powers.

Tucker isn't a journalist, he's an entertainer, or at least, a propagandist.

I like that people are having the discussion, I also like that I skipped it.

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.

"Am I a joke to you?"

• Jullian Assange