When Tucker Carlson flew to Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin, the Media Research Center’s first instinct was to … defend Carlson. (Not a surprise given its fierce defense of him after he was fired by Fox News.) Tim Graham engaged in some whataboutism-laden prebutting of the interview in his Feb. 7 podcast:
Tucker Carlson announced he’s in Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin. Elitists like Bill Kristol and Adam Kinzinger exploded in anger at the “traitor,” who somehow shouldn’t be allowed back in the country. Journalists have been known to interview anti-American tyrants before, so what gives?
Barbara Walters, George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, and Megyn Kelly (in her NBC days) all interviewed Putin, and the elites never trashed them as “traitors.” Could we wait and see what happens?
Lester Holt just interviewed Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations for the NBC Nightly News, and no one called him a “traitor” for interviewing someone from an an authoritarian anti-American regime.
In the podcast itself, Graham huffed:
Now, I don’t think it’s a great idea to interview anti-American tyrants … but journalists do this. Obviously, there’s a lot of people who want to huff and puff and say Tucker Carlson’s not a journalist. Well, this is knida what we say a lot of the time about people on CNN or MSNBC or the softball-throwers at the White House briefing room. Mary Bruce — is she a journalist? Manu Raju, really? It’s the way people sort of disparage each other.
Graham offered no evidence that Bruce or Raju have ever acted like Carlson. In the midst of all his whataboutism, Graham did eventually admit that “I think it’s a little distasteful” — then, a few minutes later, declared, “Let journalism flow.”
When the interview proved to be as softball as everyone expected, Graham still took the whataboutism approach to defend it in his Feb. 12 podcast:
Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin sent CNN host Chris Wallace into the ceiling. On his Saturday show, he said calling Tucker a useful idiot was an insult to useful idiots. He also called him an “eager puppy.”
This is an interesting tactic for Chris Wallace, since in 2017, he publicly criticized Fox News’s opinion hosts for bashing the media as unprofessional. See, it’s okay for Wallace to say someone’s not a journalist, they’re an eager puppy. But Tucker should never say that about oh, say, Brian Williams or Don Lemon.
This is also an interesting tack since it was his own father Mike Wallace who went to meet with Ayatollah Khomeini in his earliest days as the dictator of Iran, and American hostage-taker back in 1979. He’s remembered for describing the view of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat: “He called you, forgive me, Imam — his words, not mine — ‘a lunatic.'” Was Chris Wallace proud of that? Or was Daddy an eager puppy?
In the podcast itself, Graham served up a half-hearted defense of Carlson by noting that he did ask Putin about jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Ivan Gershkovich.
It wasn’t until a Feb. 15 post by Nicholas Fondacaro that the MRC actually offered any sort of criticism of the Carlson-Putin interview that wasn’t buried in a podcast — but, because this was part of Fondacaro’s hate-watching of “The View,” he was mostly angry that the co-hosts made a nasty little joke about it by claiming that Tucker Putin would be “a great stripper name”:
With X personality Tucker Carlson trapesing around Moscow, Russia pretending like the glorified third-world country still unable to dig itself out of the hole communism put it in was some kind of bastion of Western Civilization, ABC’s The View decided to break the broadcast network blackout to take some swipes at him. Of course, their jokes were fairly unoriginal and, in the case of moderator Whoopi Goldberg, bizarrely sexual.
Calling Carlson’s trip to Russia and his interview with President Putin “insane,” Goldberg began the segment by saying “Carlson gave a megaphone to one of America’s biggest threats by posting his social media sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and even Putin trashed the interview” by saying he wasn’t left “fully satisfied” by it.
Something about their names tickled something in Goldberg’s brain; leading her to interrupt herself to announce she had discovered “a great stripper name”:
[…]Keying in on Putin being left unsatisfied, co-host Ana Navarro went with the obligatory bad-at-sex joke. “As you just read there, Putin said that he didn’t get complete satisfaction from Tucker. I have a feeling that’s not the first time Tucker Carlson has heard those words. Or the last,” she chided.
Fondacaro did concede at the end of his post that “Goldberg did have an actual critique of the interview, or rather, Carlson’s lack of ability to be an interviewer.”
Meanwhile, Graham continued to be reluctant to make any sort of prominent criticism of Carlson, burying in the final paragraph of the summary of his Feb. 16 podcast that “We also discuss Tucker Carlson’s controversial videos touting Moscow’s subway and supermarkets as superior to the United States.” And that (along with Fodacaro) was the only reference to Carlson’s hilariously naive tour of Moscow’s subways and grocery stores at NewsBusters.
Not only does Graham’s reluctance to take a non-podcast stand on Carlson counter that of Fondacaro, it contradicts the stands of other MRC employees. Even his subordinate Curtis Houck tweeted: “Just as the right likes to tell leftists who hate America to just leave, I’m going to say the same to those on the right who keep leg-humping Russia. You’re free to leave if it’s so free and open there compared to America!” Houck went on to declare that “Increasing pockets of the right being infatuated with Russia should read up on how many Russians — idk — don’t have running toilets, how few actually attend church, and the prevalence of domestic violence.”
Why is Graham so afraid to criticize Carlson on the website he runs? Perhaps because Carlson is still willing to act as a useful idiot for the MRC’s right-wing narratives. Indeed, a Feb. 19 post by Christian Baldwin gushed that “Independent journalist Tucker Carlson had his ‘mind blown’ by cybersecurity expert Mike Benz’s latest revelations of a vast conspiracy of government agencies, universities and civic centers to reportedly rig elections through electoral subversion and propaganda.” Baldwin made no mention of Carlson’s Putin and Moscow adventures the previous week.