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Before we get started, two pieces of news from the home front. First: starting today, Jem Bartholomew, a contributing writer at CJR, will be the point person for this newsletter and write our “Other Notable Stories” feature, which will become a weekly fixture, appearing on Mondays. (Jon Allsop will continue to write the main newsletter feature on Mondays and Tuesdays.) Jem will cast his expert eye across the global media landscape and keep you up to date on the stories we’re watching. To get in touch, email him at jem.bartholomew@cjr.org.
Second: last week, Josh Hersh, a CJR editor and the host of our podcast The Kicker, attended the ZEG Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi, Georgia. This week, we’ll be running a special series of podcasts he recorded there. You can find the first one—a conversation with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, a Guardian journalist, on his experiences as a conflict zone correspondent—here.
In the middle of last week, as President Trump flirted with joining Israel’s bombing campaign against Iran and its nuclear infrastructure, Tucker Carlson—the Fox host turned independent right-wing podcaster, who, as I noted in last Tuesday’s newsletter, has vehemently opposed US involvement in the conflict—posted a clip from a forthcoming interview with Senator Ted Cruz, who supports regime change in Iran (if not, for now, putting US boots on the ground to achieve it). Carlson asked Cruz how many people live in Iran. Cruz didn’t know. Carlson, pulling the incredulous grimace that he has perfected over the years, asked Cruz why he didn’t know. “I don’t sit around memorizing population tables,” Cruz replied. Carlson proceeded to ask Cruz about the ethnic makeup of Iran, in an exchange that quickly degenerated into yelling. “You’re a senator who’s calling for the overthrow of the government,” Carlson snorted, leaning forward in his chair, “and you don’t know anything about the country!” Responding to the clip on X, Cruz accused Carlson of “gotcha” journalism, and said that he wouldn’t play that “silly game.” He then posted a meme that depicted Carlson asking Luke Skywalker to specify the population of the Death Star.
The clip drew support for Carlson from some unusual sources, including anti-war voices on the left. “Why are Netanyahu, Trump, and now Ted Cruz making me like Tucker Carlson???” Mehdi Hasan, a progressive journalist who excels at conducting tough interviews (as I noted in a CJR profile back in 2021), wrote. “This is EXCELLENT interviewing. If only more US interviewers asked pro-war politicians questions like this.” MSNBC’s Zeeshan Aleem described the clip as “a minute-and-a-half version of the meme ‘The worst person you know just made a great point.’” The Intercept’s Natasha Lennard likewise invoked that meme—though she also invoked another, arguing that you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Tucker Carlson. “He was simply doing what so many establishment reporters have failed to do: He asked whether a top U.S. politician pushing for an unprovoked Manichean forever war knew basically anything about the people he was seeking to subject to American hellfire,” she wrote. “This is not a credit to Carlson. It’s a failure of the mainstream media.”
In last Tuesday’s newsletter, I noted that mainstream coverage of US adventurism abroad has often been defined by a reflexive hawkishness and lack of due skepticism—especially, of course, in the infamous run-up to the disastrous US war in Iraq—but that previous escalations under Trump, not least the assassination of the top Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in 2020, had inspired somewhat more vigorous questioning, if only because of Trump’s penchants for recklessness and dishonesty. So far this time around, I’d observed something similar, on the whole. (Lennard also noted last week that the coverage had “at the very least reiterated the statements of the United States’ own intelligence agencies and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, among others, that, despite their concerns about Iran’s amassing of enriched uranium, there is no compelling evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.”) Then, on Saturday night, Trump escalated matters much further, ordering a strike on three sites linked to Iran’s nuclear program. The strikes “were a spectacular military success,” Trump claimed at the White House. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” The scene was only wanting for a banner and nautical backdrop, and sure enough, less certain assessments soon rolled in. Other US officials suggested that while Iran’s facilities were damaged, they may not have been totally destroyed. (Iranian officials downplayed the impact, too.)
The strikes were perfectly timed to dominate the Sunday shows (which, given Trump’s past form and old-school media habits, may or may not have been a coincidence), and those shows duly offered an early indication as to how much skepticism major outlets might apply to the administration’s rationale for the strikes and claims of their huge success. There were some sharp questions. On Face the Nation, on CBS, Margaret Brennan pressed Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, as to whether the US intelligence community had now seen any evidence that Iran’s rulers had ordered nuclear weaponization, then pushed back when Rubio described this as “irrelevant.” On This Week, on ABC, Jonathan Karl asked Vice President JD Vance about Trump’s “obliterated” claim (Vance: “Well, Jon, severely damaged versus obliterated, I’m not exactly sure what the difference is”) and the hawkish Republican senator Tom Cotton about his past support of regime change in Iran. On Meet the Press, on NBC, Kristen Welker confronted Lindsey Graham, also a hawkish Republican senator, with his past support for the Iraq war based on faulty intelligence. “Why should the American people believe that this was the right time to strike Iran?” she asked.
And yet each of these interviews also featured moments I liked much less. At one point, Brennan seemed to concur with Rubio that the strikes were technically “astounding.” Karl failed to push back when Vance made the nonsensical claim that the US is not at war with Iran, but only with its nuclear program. Welker also interviewed Vance, and didn’t push back on that claim either; nor did she push back when Vance said that while he can “certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after twenty-five years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East,” the difference “is that back then we had dumb presidents.” In all, the interviews confirmed my prior sense that while the mainstream media is not uniformly engaged in an Iraq-style boosterism mission, there is nonetheless room for more skepticism out there.
If this is a question of judgment, it is also one of format. The Sunday shows are very traditional forums, as I’ve noted before; their venerable self-conception as neutral arbiters of political disputes, and generally consensual philosophy, mean that they rarely play host to very adversarial lines of questioning or fiery debate. More prosaically, they also have time constraints. (Their generally laser-like focus on Iran yesterday was welcome; often, they try to get politicians to make news on a number of fronts, affording even less space to challenge their views on a given topic.) It’s a format that can feel like a relic in this new media environment. By contrast, Carlson’s showdown with Cruz felt exceedingly of the moment. (There are complications to this analysis—if Carlson v. Cruz on the population of Iran went viral, so, too, seemingly, did Vance’s answer to Welker on dumb presidents—though the latter blew up in spite of a lack of on-screen conflict, whereas the first blew up because of it.)
In one sense, Carlson’s interview with Cruz channels an apparent new-media contradiction: the population row, for example, seemed expertly torqued for short-form social media virality, but, much like many modern political or politics-adjacent podcasts, it was part of an interview that was very long. (It ran for just under two hours in total.) The population row wasn’t the only such moment in that time: at one point, Cruz appeared to insinuate that Carlson is an anti-Semite for “obsessing” over the influence of Israel on US foreign policy, leading Carlson to accuse him of “sleazy, feline” behavior; after Cruz quoted the Bible to explain his support for Israel, Carlson revealed Cruz not to know where in the Bible the quote came from; later, Carlson pressed repeatedly for detailed evidence that Iran is actively trying to assassinate Trump. And yet the conversation wasn’t reducible to the gotcha moments, either: on numerous occasions, Carlson and Cruz stressed their agreement; at one point, Carlson reflected on his regret for supporting the war in Iraq; on the whole, a nuanced and often substantive picture emerged of two men who clearly view each other as caricatures, respectively, of a reckless neocon and a feckless isolationist but clearly do not view themselves in those terms. Not that this is to hand it to either man. Cruz embarrassed himself by repeatedly resorting to ad hominem attacks when Carlson poked holes in his arguments. Carlson, among other false and/or unsavory positions, at one point likened the January 6 rioters to dissidents in authoritarian societies. (There were also weird ads featuring Carlson endorsing “self-defense launchers” and Hillsdale College: “That’s Tucker For Hillsdale dot com to enroll for free.”)
I still think that Tucker Carlson is a very dangerous man: during his Fox days, he created what the New York Times memorably described as perhaps “the most racist show in the history of cable news,” and platformed conspiracy theories, often under the pretense that he was just asking questions. I certainly wouldn’t prescribe a news diet of his podcast over Meet the Press. And yet—if his lengthy podcast interview with Cruz highlighted some of the informational risks of that burgeoning format, and how it certainly can’t be a substitute for rigorous journalism—I think it showed some of its potential, too, or at least that it isn’t, inherently and totally, at odds with the interests of journalism. Back in March, I wrote (after reading a book about Gary Hart, of all people) that the long-standing impulse for politicians to stonewall journalists and talk only in meticulously focus-grouped, risk-averse sound bites appears to be giving way to a greater desire to think things through at length and out loud. The form this takes is often imperfect—and sometimes outright dumb—and the incentives behind it might reflect less a good-faith move toward candor and more the slow death of accountability for saying and doing formerly career-ending stuff. Sometimes, of course, the news needs to be condensed—and to glean genuine insight from Carlson, you need to go in with an advanced understanding of who he is. Yet I do feel I learned much more from two hours of Carlson and Cruz than eighteen (long, by TV standards!) minutes of Vance on Meet the Press.
And of all the interviews I’ve seen in the past few days, Carlson’s clearly did the best job of puncturing the ignorance that so often lies behind calls for regime change abroad; yes, he was asking gotchas—and yes, these can be crude and distracting—but sometimes it takes a stupid question to expose the stupidity of a position. (And, following the weekend strikes, regime change may be what we’re dealing with here: after sending out his officials to dutifully say the US is not trying to effect as much yesterday morning, Trump posted on social media that while the term is not “politically correct,” it may be justified if “the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN.”) As Hasan and Lennard suggested, there’s nothing to stop mainstream interlocutors asking questions like this. But the consensual codes of elite US media being what they are—and the horror of appearing to be partisan or rude being what it is—it’s unlikely that they’ll start doing so anytime soon, and so we might sometimes have to rely on scoundrels (or, worse, comedians) to do it instead. Following the heated exchange on Israeli influence that led Cruz to suggest Carlson was an anti-Semite, Cruz suggested that they ratchet down the temperature, leading Carlson to respond, “You’re the one who went to motive; I’m asking honest questions.” He then affected a pious voice: “Just asking questions—yes, that is what I’m doing.” The conversation then cut to an ad for a wireless company that’s giving away American flags that are actually made in America.
Other notable stories
By Jem Bartholomew
- Over the weekend, Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate student at Columbia University and activist for Palestinian rights, was freed following more than a hundred days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Louisiana. Khalil, a thirty-year-old permanent legal US resident, was not accused of a crime, but Rubio invoked a twentieth-century law as part of an effort to deport him for supposedly undermining US foreign policy. Last month, a federal judge ruled that this was likely to be unconstitutional. After being released on bail, Khalil returned to New York City on Saturday. “It felt like kidnapping,” he said in an interview with the Times, the first that he granted post-release. In other news, Alistair Kitchen, an Australian writer and recent Columbia student who had covered pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations, was denied entry to the US, detained, and then deported last week. He wrote about his ordeal in The New Yorker.
- On Saturday, thirteen political prisoners were unexpectedly freed from jail in Belarus, including Sergei Tikhanovsky, an opposition leader and popular YouTuber, and Ihar Karnei, a journalist for the US broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Tikhanovsky was arrested in 2020 as he prepared to run for president against the country’s authoritarian ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, and was jailed for eighteen years on politically motivated charges. His release came as US special envoy Keith Kellogg traveled to Belarus, which has aided Russia’s war on Ukraine, to meet with Lukashenko. Tikhanovsky said he was kept in solitary confinement for five years, and urged Donald Trump to ask for all Belarusian political prisoners to be freed. Also over the weekend, Vladyslav Yesypenko, an RFE/RL contributor, was freed from jail in Russian-occupied Crimea.
- In the UK, the broadcasters Sky, ITV, and Channel 4 last week announced plans to pool advertising resources in an effort to break Big Tech’s stranglehold on digital ads. The broadcasters—who have seen ad revenue collapse in recent years, with Google and Meta accounting for two-thirds of the UK’s ad market, according to The Guardian—are joining forces through Comcast’s Universal Ads platform. They hope to raise thirty billion pounds (forty billion dollars). In other news about broadcasters taking on Big Tech, the Financial Times reports that the BBC is threatening legal action against Perplexity, an AI search engine, for allegedly scraping its content.
- “Congrats on the new position, if anybody can do that you can.” “We’ve been friends a long time, Dan.” “Are you enjoying yourself?” “Go get ’em, Pete.” The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr analyzed what happens when former Fox pundits hired by Trump—including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and FBI deputy director Dan Bongino—appear back on the network for interviews, resulting in “a heaping of pleasantries and a few tricky questions.”
- And the war reporter Rod Nordland, who covered major global conflicts over four decades for the New York Times and other publications, died on Wednesday from brain cancer. He was seventy-five. Later in his career, he turned his attention inward, writing about illness and the discovery of a brain tumor. Nordland’s specialties included his “unflinching prose” and attention to “the most vulnerable people in a conflict,” his Times obituary said.
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