MRCTV writer Nick Kangadis aggressively noped out on judging Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin — even though snap judgment is presumably what the MRC pays him to do — in a Feb. 9 post:
The left have lost their minds over this. The establishment elite and globalists have lost their minds over this. The FACT of the matter is, it doesn’t matter how you feel about independent journalist Tucker Carlson or Russian President Vladimir Putin, journalism is journalism. And as someone with an honors degree in Journalism, THIS interview between Carlson and Putin was journalism at its finest.
In case you live under a rock, Carlson released his much anticipated and even more vilified interview with Putin on Thursday evening. The interview, as Carlson intimated, was held on Tuesday.
Opposition to this interview seems to hate it so much because its something out of their control — so much so, that you, the viewer, made your voices heard through the sheer number of viewers on multiple platforms.
It’s not clear how many viewers Carlson received on his website, but the numbers speak for themselves on platforms like X and YouTube. As of this writing, in an 18-hour timespan, about 7.4 million people have watched the video on Carlson’s YouTube channel alone — forget that the interview has been viewed many millions more times on other channels as well. As for X, as astounding 139.7 million accounts have viewed the interview. Now, those views might just be someone passing by it on their X feed, stopping for a couple of seconds and moving on. But, there aren’t very many videos on X that receive that amount of views, no matter the watch time.
As for the content of the interview itself, what I am about to present to you is most likely what no other outlet will provide for you. I took notes and timestamps along the way throughout the two-plus hour interview documenting information and context people might want to know, and I will simply provide you with the subject matter, or question, and answer in their full quote with the aforementioned timestamps.
No matter what anyone on the left, or the right for that matter, might say about this interview, I believe it is up to ALL OF YOU to decide for yourselves what to do and how to interpret the information and context given.
When it comes to true journalism, there’s only one thing you can do…think for yourself and come to conclusions based on the information given to the best of your understanding.
Before adding several transcript segments from the interview, Kangadis then supplied some highly biased pro-Putin framing:
Before I get to absolute specifics, the first half hour or so of the interview is basically Putin giving a detailed, yet succinct history lesson of Russia and Ukraine pretty much up to present day.
Putin also mentioned the CIA a number of times during the first half of the interview, almost implying that they make a lot of the decisions for the U.S. on the international stage.
Another quick note is that Putin also invoked NATO throughout the interview, conveying that a lot of the escalation of matters over the years can be attributed to that group’s reneging on its once-upon-a-time promise that they would not advance its membership to basically encircle Russia. Putin noted that NATO did this five times.
Because Kangadis refused to fact-check Putin, his readers don’t know that his claim that the Soviet Union saved Europe during World War II omitted the existence of Western troops and the fact that millions of Ukrainian soldiers were part of the Soviet Red Army. Kangadis also curiously failed to include the transcript of the part of the interview where Putin blamed Poland for Hitler invading it.
Despite Putin’s complaining about NATO, Kangadis failed to acknowledge in his highlighting of it that NATO is a defensive alliance and posed no actual threat to Russia.
Meanwhile, most analysts agree that Carlson got played by Putin and that the interview was almost entirely softball questions. But Kangadis won’t tell you that — just like he refused to make the very basic and factual admission that Russia invaded Ukraine on dubious pretext and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of casualties. He apparently doesn’t seem to think this context is important for judging this interview.