The prevalence of social media today is a powerful factor in keeping us misinformed and divided.
49% of all people and 69% of 18 to 29-year-olds get their news from social media.1 That’s like getting your news from Cussing Colin, the drunk fella with hair-dyed skin along his hairline who stands on the corner trying to chat to every passerby by shouting out crazy things.
The internet presents an opportunity for any rando to share whatever claims they like on any subject and we already know how easily manipulated we are when presented with ideas that support our existing views. We’ll lap them up, regardless of how crazy they may be simply because we want them to be true.
But it’s not just complete randos we need to worry about, there are plenty of seemingly reputable and official-looking accounts spreading fake news for profit.
I’ve mentioned The Epoch Times before and some possible trust issues with them using an out-of-date, but more favourable, assessment of their neutrality when explaining why we should believe their reporting.
As detailed on Wikipedia, the publisher has been banned from advertising on Facebook for breaking the guidelines advertisers are expected to comply with.2 Epoch Times believe they did comply and the ban is unfair and you can make your own decision on whether you think their claim is reasonable. What I do want to highlight is their reported practice of being linked to multiple different accounts under names that don’t make any connection obvious. These accounts are said to be managed by overseas operators and use stock photos and AI-generated images for the account profile photos.
One sound piece of advice when trying to get the full story on any news story is to get reports from multiple sources. That should give you a variety of different viewpoints that share all the details, reducing the possibility of different journalists’ biases hiding some facts that don’t align with the story they want to tell. This approach is obviously undermined when a single source is disseminating the same information through multiple seemingly unrelated sources to make it appear that one viewpoint is commonly held by many different people.
I’m not saying that The Epoch Times is indulging in such a practice to dishonestly try to manipulate people, but don’t you wonder why any trustworthy news organisation would take such an approach?
I guess it would come down to money, that tends to be the incentive for most actions in the world. It certainly seems to explain the actions of Alex Jones of Infowars.
In 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, 20 children no older than seven years old and six adult staff were shot dead. Following the attack and for years afterwards, Alex Jones repeatedly stated that the attack was a hoax. Then almost 10 years later in court he admitted the attack was “100 percent real”.3 From the reporting, I’ve inferred that he was suggesting that he now had new information having met some of the parents of those killed, but doesn’t that seem a pretty weak excuse?
Jones has admitted that on a good day, his Infowars business, which is also the brand under which he often pushed his claims, could make $800,000 in revenue. I guess when so much money is on offer, some people will make false claims even if it means putting the parents of murdered children through “living hell”.4
Perhaps more concerning is how lax journalism is also becoming more mainstream.
I’ve previously accused the American journalist Tucker Carlson of being a heffalump lover and that may explain why Tucker Carlson is the only Western journalist whose request to interview the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has been granted, despite the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, admitting they reject dozens of interview requests every day.5
Still, it did make for a fascinating piece of journalism. Did you see it? I think there were some stand-out questions.
I particularly liked the opener, “what’s your favourite colour?”, which Putin named as red. Interestingly, Carlson seemed to think his own contributions would also be valued by the viewers, which is how we now know his favourite colour is plaid. Not sure he really understood his own question.
Later we had the probing “imagine you’re in an interrogation cell with all the members of global phenomenon K-pop act Blackpink strapped into chairs and drugged with truth serum – which one do you touch up first?” Even Putin seemed to raise an eyebrow over the appropriateness or otherwise of that as a question in this day and age, still, he answered Rosé.
And Carlson? Baby Spice. Umm…well…yeah.
And then right at the end, the classic “your house is on fire and you can only save one thing, what do you save?” Putin answering that he’d save the launch codes for the nuclear arsenal of the Russian Federation wasn’t a huge surprise. Carlson’s admission that he’d save his favourite teddy bear, Flossy Droppants, more so. Though, by the end of his passionate and rambling 45-minute homily on his favourite teddy, he did seem to have genuine tears in his eyes and it all made the memory of Putin’s opening answer that offered an extensive and lengthy insight into the history of Russia feel a lot less painful on reflection.
Obviously, those weren’t real Tucker Carlson questions from the interview. At least I hope it’s obvious, as I said, I’ve not encountered Carlson other than in this interview and one other mention that came up earlier.
As highlighted above, Putin has rejected requests for a huge number of interviews since starting the war with Ukraine. Surely many of those will have been from specialists in Russian affairs, yet he picked a generalist who has displayed heffalump sympathies to be the only foreign journalist to interview him. Did he think Carlson was likely to be a forceful and challenging interviewer?
I hadn’t seen the interview until today.6 Actually, yesterday and today, it runs to over two hours and I had to break it into three parts to fit it around other things. It wasn’t a compelling binge-watchable experience. I had seen reports on it though, mostly negative, but I went into watching it with as open a mind as possible.
It had been reported that Putin’s first answer was worldie level ramble and that description just about nails it. Carlson did make attempts to interrupt and move him on, but it had no effect. At a quarter way into the interview, I felt most of the criticism I’d read was unfair and that Carlson had basically accepted a lose-lose assignment. If he didn’t push Putin hard, he’d be accused of producing a powder-puff piece and if he did push too hard, he ran the risk of Putin just getting up and walking out. Or maybe having Carlson shot live on screen.
As the interview progressed, it became clear that Carlson wasn’t knowledgeable about the modern history of Ukraine. Prepping for the interview by learning about just the last 20 or so years alone would have put him in a better position to think and respond on his feet. As he didn’t, an obvious way to handle that would be to overlay information to fact-check dubious claims from Putin or even intercut into the interview to clarify points. However, the interview was just presented as is for the viewers to consume, with no comment.
Interestingly, Putin regularly used a technique that is often used by some parts of the media, innuendo. It allows the speaker to make the audience likely to believe something, without explicitly spelling it out. The result is like telling a lie, but without actually telling the lie. You say enough to set the audience’s thoughts in the right direction and have them join the dots to believe the thing you want them to believe.
One example of this relates to a conversation Putin claims to have had with Zelensky when he asked him why he supported neo-nazis in Ukraine and then said he won’t share what he said as he felt it wouldn’t be correct, like he’d be breaching a secret confidence of a friend. We, the audience, expect that the obvious answer from Zelensky would be that he doesn’t support neo-nazis and it would be easy for Putin to share that. By not sharing the answer, Putin planted the seed that the answer was something different. It’s a simple technique and clearly effective with a lot of people, which is probably why he used the technique repeatedly throughout the interview. And being such a common media approach, I’d have expected Carlson to highlight such uses and push Putin for clarity, but no they were just left hanging for the audience to reach their own conclusion.
Linked to this is Putin’s statement that “I will not go into details, I never do.” That’s convenient as the truth often hides in the details. True to his word, he repeatedly ignored the details. Pushing for details is what we usually expect from interviewers, but again Carlson seemed uninterested in pushing for full answers.
Despite Putin’s love of innuendo, there were also complete untruths.
He claimed sanctions against Russia were against the UN Charter. Sanctions are permitted, though technically sanctions against a permanent member of the Security Council, such as Russia, wouldn’t be permitted because those members have a veto. The UN has not placed sanctions against Russia, though other countries and groups have and they don’t contravene the UN Charter. Carlson didn’t challenge the claim at the time or clarify the real position with his audience.
Putin raised the point of Ukrainian President Zelensky and the whole Canadian parliament applauding a man who fought with the Nazi SS in World War Two, yet didn’t mention that the speaker apologised and resigned and the Canadian Prime Minister also apologised. The speaker had assumed the man had fought against the Nazis. Clearly, it was an embarrassing mistake, but that’s all it was, not evidence of Zelensky being a Nazi. Carlson didn’t point this out to Putin or explain the truth to his audience.
Putin seems to have a bit of a fixation with what he calls coups in Ukraine. He’s appalled that the 2004 election between Yushchenko and Yanukovych7 went to a third round, which he described as unconstitutional and a coup. He ignores the fact that the second round voting was declared invalid by the Supreme Court of Ukraine over concerns of vote rigging and the third round was a re-run of the second round. I guess it’s no surprise that an autocrat wouldn’t be concerned about vote rigging being unconstitutional. Carlson could have pointed this out, at the time or later, but chose not to.
He seems equally upset that in 2014 the Ukrainian people rose up against a government that refused to sign a trade agreement with the EU that the Ukrainian parliament had voted for.8 While that did become a violent uprising with deaths among the police, though significantly less than the deaths among the protesters, the movement was seeking to have the will of the democratically elected parliament honoured. The President was trying to do something that the majority of the people didn’t want him to do. I’m sure you can understand why an autocrat would find the idea of the people standing up for their rights and elected institutions quite obscene, but a President refusing to act on a decision of parliament probably more closely matches the description of a coup than the protests. Again Carlson let the lie through unchallenged.
Carlson even got in on the act himself at least once. At around the 1:34 mark, he asked if US Vice President Kamala Harris’s encouragement to Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference for Ukraine to join NATO was a provocation to start the war. It’s not the only time he’s claimed that Harris encouraged Zelensky to join NATO, but there’s no evidence to support the claim. I’ve checked through the published statements from the conference and the briefing the day before.9 There’s little mention about Ukraine wanting to join NATO, but in one document we can see Harris used the words “appreciate”, “admire” and “respect” in relation to Zelensky’s desire to join. I’ve looked at a few thesaurus sites and none of them list any of those three words as synonyms for “encourage”.
It’s bad enough when randoms on social media make stuff up, but there’s no excuse for a professional journalist to do so. Their job is to report the facts and in some cases to comment and offer opinion on it. Their job is not to make things up to try and manipulate people to believe what they want them to believe.
Worse than that though, is repeating the lie in front of an autocratic leader who has started a war that has potentially killed hundreds of thousands of people to offer them the chance to shift the blame to someone else.
During World War ll, William Joyce, who was born in America and raised in Ireland before gaining a British passport, broadcast nazi propaganda from Germany to the UK, becoming known as Lord Haw-Haw because of his plummy upper-class accent.
He paid no regard or affiliation to the nation named on his passport, instead seeking personal advantage by offering support and succour to a vicious dictator who cared as little about the deaths of his own people as he did about the deaths of his enemies.
Who do you think that last paragraph described, Joyce or Carlson?
To Carlson’s credit, towards the end of the interview, he raised the situation of the journalist Evan Gershkovich, who is being held in Russia on accusations of espionage. He was absolutely clear that he believed Gershkovich was innocent and he was being held purely as a bargaining chip for the Russian President.
But one swallow does not a summer make. I went into viewing his interview with Putin thinking the opinions I’d read could be tainted by bias. Having not seen him before and knowing little about him, I was almost as free of bias as possible, but it was frustrating that at times he focussed on Putin’s opinions of how the actions of the US with regard to the war would affect the US, when there were so many other routes his questioning could have gone.
Sometimes, regardless of how difficult it may be, we have to ask the difficult questions, like “Statham, for the love of the sweet baby beavers, what was that accent meant to be, fella?”10
Or “Mr Putin, how many Russians have been killed or injured so far and how many are you prepared to sacrifice to try to win the war?”
Or “following your claims that the land of Ukraine historically belonged to Russia, how do you justify ignoring the human rights of modern Ukrainians living there now who have clearly demonstrated they do not wish to be part of Russia or subjugated to the rule of an absolute autocratic leader? Do you consider it reasonable and legal to kill large numbers of Ukrainians to force them to bend to your demands?”
Or “the International Criminal Court have filed charges against you and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children, how do you answer those charges?”
Or “is there anything you would like to say to the families and friends of 85-year-old Yulia Buyskikh11 or 19-year-old Tatyana Mostyko12, both of who were reportedly killed by men who had been released from prison for previous killings so they could fight in Ukraine and were then returned to Russia at the end of their service?”
Or “at least one UN report has found that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes, will you ensure those accused of such crimes face justice?”
Or “obviously you anticipated a quick war, how quick and who is to blame for the failure to execute those plans for a quick war?”
Or “Russia’s newest warplane, the SU-57, can’t fly in the warzone, the T-14 main battle tank has spent years in parades but not a single day in Ukraine and claimed cutting-edge hypersonic missiles like Kinzhal appear to be rehashes of yesterday’s ballistic missile tech, which may be why Ukrainian air defences have been able to shoot them down. Are Russia’s scientists and engineers lying to you about your country’s weapons? Are Russia’s war plans based on capabilities that don’t exist in the real world?”
Or “you’ve referenced Russia’s arsenal of nuclear weapons on several occasions when talking about what you see as the aggression of the West. What line would the West need to cross for you to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine and/or NATO members?”
Or “you have said there is no need for the world if there is no Russia. Do you consider yourself distinct from Russia or should we see that as meaning you see no need for the world if you face losing power?”
Or “were you tricked into the war by the West so that Ukrainians would act as a proxy force to degrade Russia as a military force for a generation or more?”
Now, would I fly to Russia and sit down in the Kremlin with Putin and ask him those questions? Maybe the last few, but most of the rest, no way and to be honest, I’d probably not take a punt on the Jason Statham one either. I may say some bat-ship crazy stuff, but I is not bat-ship crazy. No, we’d be zooming this sucker in. Putin there in the Kremlin, Statham in a trad East End bar surrounded by cheeky chappies and me in the men’s washroom of a sleazy breastaurant in downtown Austin – this episode of Washroom Tyrants was brought to you by Charmin Ultra Soft, Bongo Bongo Sports Bar and Comrade Sparky’s Cattle Prods.
Anyway, for all of that, I’m not telling Carlson how to do his job.13 I appreciate it’s a pressured and difficult role, but I was left thinking there were important issues that weren’t even touched upon and I’m sure there would be other questions that you would have wanted answered too.
And that’s an important lesson for both of us to always keep in mind. Don’t just assess the information that journalists give us, we should also be thinking about the things that haven’t been raised and how that may shape what we think. While I’m not specifically addressing this to Carlson’s interview with Putin, the phrase “lying by omission” exists for a reason.
- https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/?tabItem=b39b851c-e417-48ef-9b10-93ee21a0030e ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times ↩︎
- https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/alex-jones-concedes-sandy-hook-attack-was-100-percent-real ↩︎
- https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-father-of-6-year-old-killed-at-sandy-hook-says-alex-jones-made-his-life-a-living-hell ↩︎
- https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2024/02/10/carlson-is-wrong-many-western-journalists-tried-to-interview-putin/72538761007/ ↩︎
- https://tuckercarlson.com/the-vladimir-putin-interview/ and there’s a transcript here https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/tucker-carlson-interviews-vladimir-putin-transcript ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ukrainian_presidential_election ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity ↩︎
- This link probably won’t take you to the correct page as newer releases will push posts from 18 February and the following days to a later page, so you’ll have to search as I did – https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/page/690/ ↩︎
- Daniel Craig exhales deeply and wipes his brow, “phew, that was close, praise be that he picked on The Transporter.” ↩︎
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-28/wagner-fighter-charged-with-murder-in-russia/102533296 ↩︎
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66364272 ↩︎
- D’oh, of course I am, but he strikes me as the kind of person who doesn’t read footnotes ↩︎