Tucker Carlson’s on-camera interview last week with Vladimir Putin was a coup of sorts, although quite what sort of coup is unclear.
Whatever reservations are held about the maverick rightwing TV star, it was an achievement for him to gain access to the Russian president, even if it was not unique. The BBC’s Andrew Marr, FT editor Lionel Barbour and Chris Wallace of Fox News are just some of the other journalists who have trod through the halls of the Kremlin for an audience with the modern day Tsar.
The interview does not seem to have enhanced anybody’s reputation. In spite of lengthy lectures which left Carlson looking uneasy during their two hours together, Putin will have persuaded no-one new of his fabled version of Russian history obliging him to seek bloody re-union with Ukraine.
The reviews on Carlson are in. Lenin’s “useful idiot” jibe has been hung around his neck repeatedly. Carlson was unable or unwilling to ask any awkward questions – these encounters are often intimidating for the interviewer, while the Russian bear repeatedly turned up his nose and refused to bite on the MAGA conspiracy theories Tucker laid out for his approval.
Encounters with monstrous or hyper-elusive political leaders are great “gets” for interviewers and their organisations, often followed by industry awards. They may entertain but whether they inform or educate in useful ways is open to question, especially in this era when mass broadcast audiences are fragmenting into video segments consumed by those who seek it out when they feel like it.
The old forms of broadcasting are giving way to the new. Gatekeeping is not possible so standards of veracity and intention are plummeting. Tucker Carlson lost his anchor job at Fox News last year but did not need to find another mainstream or cable berth. He set up as his own content provider, posting his material online, including the Putin interview, primarily via YouTube.
This weekend, Piers Morgan announced that he is doing a Tucker, although this time with Rupert Murdoch’s blessing. He is staying within News Corp but he is abandoning regular broadcasts on Talk TV, the channel set up three years ago with him as the main star. Material from Piers Morgan Uncensored – mainly interviews with newsmakers and celebrities – will now be posted online. Piers already has many more followers, most of them in the US, than he did TV viewers.
Major interviews with controversial politicians used to purport to be challenging exposés of the subject. These days the interviewer needs the encounter more than the interviewee. With much choice now over where interviews are bestowed, they have become commercial properties in their own right, and favours to be granted before a word has been recorded.
The model for the big TV interview remains David Frost’s interviews in 1977 with Richard M Nixon, now memorialised in the book and the film Frost/Nixon. Few were interested in hearing from the disgraced former president at the time. Like today’s own content providers, but with less of a safety net or certain audience and outlet, Frost had to take on the commercial risk himself.
There were other crucial differences. Frost was not obligated to Nixon for the access, he had paid him for it. He and his production team also knew what they wanted from the encounter. Eventually, Frost extracted it. Nixon apologised to the American people for Watergate.
Back then, British interviewers led the way into tricky encounters with post-imperial swagger. Alan Whicker was Frost’s rival globetrotter. Whicker developed a specialty by making documentaries which culminated in an interview with a monster sacrĂ©. His documentary with the dictator of Haiti was a sensation. Papa Doc Duvalier argued on camera that he was “not a dictator, a strong man! Democracy is only a word – it is a philosophy, a conception.”
Whicker was less successful in making The Last Dictator in Paraguay. He shot an informative and sympathetic portrait of Alfredo Stroessner, opining that for all the torture and disappearances the locals needed his strong hand. But the dictator declined to sit down on camera for an interview. Whicker had to make do with a handshake and an exchange of questions and answers on paper. His enterprising editor cut up file footage to make it almost look as if they were talking to each other.
Few despots have been so shy since. American TV stars competed to “bag” big baddies. Barbara Walters tried to expose the human side of Hugo Chavez. Dan Rather had two goes at Saddam Hussein. All the interviewers regarded themselves as serious journalists taking a challenging, if seldom adversarial, approach to their subjects.
Scepticism grew about these staged encounters of political and broadcasting big beasts. In a 2003 article about Dan and Saddam headlined “Rather Not”, the well-known US critic James Bowman argued that “all is reduced to the same blandly human scale on the TV screen…” so that “pointing the cameras at the enemy and allowing him to talk will immediately wash any sense of the reasons why people go to war out of the minds of the viewers and replace them with this same banality.”
Extended sit-down interviews with political leaders do inevitably humanize the interviewee. They can also be vital opportunities to tease out thinking, provided that the interviewer is capable of doing it. This requires both skill and courage. Too often, as with Carlson/Putin, the interviewee just talks and talks.
With so many opportunities to get their message out without challenge, political leaders of all kinds are taking it. British Prime Ministers no longer sit down for an hour with the likes of Brian Walden or Andrew Neil. Why should they when Rishi Sunak can have his own show on GB News standing in for Jacob Rees Mogg?
Tucker Carlson has a penchant for autocrats. He expressed his admiration for Putin, Trump, Victor Orban, and Jair Bolsanaro before they invited him in to record a chat. Piers Morgan struck up a friendship with Donald Trump on US Celebrity Apprentice which led to several exclusive interviews with the President. To Piers’s credit their friendship does not appear to have survived his true journalistic approach.
I recommend a new novel, the Wizard of the Kremlin, just out in the UK. It is a ficitionalised account of the court of “the Tsar”, Putin. In it, his chief propagandist explains that what they and their agents put out in the west doesn’t have to be persuasive, or true; it just has to spread uncertainty and chaos.
We need to think carefully about our approach to celebrity interviews with political monsters. Few journalists set out to be useful idiots.
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