What is a journalist? That’s a question that is increasingly being asked in the digital age, as Tucker Carlson interviews world leaders and anyone with a smartphone can take video and share it on social media.
Last week, Carlson released on X a half-hour video of a conversation he had with Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran. As when he interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin a year ago, the former Fox News host was accused of “platforming” America’s adversaries; some have gone so far as to call this traitorous.
Others have praised Carlson for being willing to talk with Pezeshkian and Putin, saying that what he is doing is “basic journalism” that people working at legacy news outlets are unwilling to do.
“Journalism 101 requires covering and talking to the major players in any given conflict,” Jack Hunter wrote for the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft. “Why wouldn’t an American political pundit or stateside journalist of any kind do this?" he asked, citing journalists’ interviews in the past with Iran’s leadership and with Putin and Fidel Castro.
Carlson’s interviews, and those conducted by podcasters like Joe Rogan, are part of what is called the “new media,” ascendant at a time in which legacy publishers are exploring nontraditional lanes to augment revenue and attention.
Consider The New York Times’ acquisition of Wordle, which prompted one commentator to call the Times a “games company with a newspaper side hustle.” A recent Semafor podcast explored the question “Is journalism bad for The New York Times’ business?” — and it wasn’t just a quip.
Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith, speaking with The New York Times’ CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, said he believes the “adversarial, tough journalism” of years past has been abandoned by several major news outlets because it’s seen as bad for business and media owners “are trying to find ways to steer away from it.”
But Carlson’s interview with Pezeshkian can’t be defined as adversarial or tough either; one critic pointed out how much tougher he was on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz than he was on the president of Iran.
Whether we see Carlson’s interviews as platforming or journalism may depend, in part, on how we feel about him. As for what constitutes journalism, even those who have been in the industry for decades say it’s tricky to define.
“The line between where journalism stops and becomes another form of media is not a bright line,” said Joel Simon, founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York and the author of “The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom.”
What Tucker Carlson said about Iran
Prior to releasing the interview with Masoud Pezeshkian, Carlson said he knew that it would be controversial, but that he believes Americans have “the constitutional right and the God-given right” to learn all they can about an issue that affects them and make up their own mind.
“If their country is doing something with their money in their name, they have a right, an absolute right, to know as much about it as they can, and that would include hearing from the people they’re fighting,” Carlson said.
He added, “Can you believe everything you hear from the president of Iran? Probably not. But that’s not the point. The point is, you should be able to decide for yourself whether you believe it or not.”
Detractors complained about “softball” questions and noted that Carlson was one of the right’s loudest critics of military action in Iran.
Anticipating the pushback, Carlson acknowledged the limitations of an interview done remotely through a translator and said he kept his questions simple because on some, such as whether Iran’s nuclear program was disabled by the U.S. bombs, he knew he “could not get an honest answer.”
“Again, the purpose of this was not to get to the absolute truth — that’s impossible in an interview like this — the purpose of the interview was to add to the corpus of knowledge from which Americans can derive their own opinion. Learn everything you can and then you decide. That’s the promise of America."
Erik Wemple, media critic for The Washington Post, noted that despite the constraints of the interview, Carlson’s interview made news and was covered by The Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Reuters and the Financial Times, among other publications.
“Carlson’s detractors snickered at him for his interview with Pezeshkian, the Iranian president. Perhaps they missed the American tradition of grilling pariahs, dictators and sworn enemies of the United States,” Wemple wrote.
Certainly many other examples can be raised, including Sean Penn’s interview with a drug kingpin. Was that journalism? If not, what is it?
What is a journalist?
Ben Smith, the former media columnist at The New York Times who co-founded the global news site Semafor, said in an email, “The definition has always been contested, and when I was coming up, alternative newspapers, columnists, then bloggers were on the receiving end of questions over whether they were ‘real journalists.’
“But before the growth of digital media, the power of distribution basically settled the question: Journalists were people with access to broadcast towers and printing presses, effectively.”
But as trust in media has declined and new forms of media compete for attention, “journalists don’t have the power to compel a leader who doesn’t want to talk to them to talk to them,” Simon said.
“The power dynamic is different. If you were Fidel Castro, and you sat down with Barbara Walters, everybody was going to watch that.”
Today, securing a “big get” interview, whether a world leader or a celebrity, is more complicated, as subjects can choose interviewers they think will be more sympathetic to them, or people that have a specific audience they want to reach.
Fernanda Camarena, a journalist who once worked for NBC and now teaches at the Poynter Institute, said in an email that depending on the circumstances, an interview of a world leader can be journalism, political theater or propaganda.
“Are you holding power to account? Are you verifying allegations or information presented to you? Are you challenging falsehoods? Are you adding context so the audience can better understand the nuances of an issue? Or did you stray outside the bounds of a true interview, like, for example, giving the subject your questions or topics in advance to have them ‘approved’ and prepare the source?” said Camarena, who specializes in leadership, ethics and journalistic standards.
“If someone is simply offering a megaphone, especially to leaders who use disinformation or propaganda, you’re not doing journalism, you’re just spreading their message, you’re more of a PR representative than a journalist,” she said.
Is any interview off limits?
Of course, even if something qualifies as journalism, that doesn’t necessarily make it good journalism, Simon pointed out when writing for Columbia Journalism Review in 2016 about Sean Penn’s interview with Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug kingpin known as El Chapo.
While many journalists found the interview reprehensible, Simon pointed out that Penn, best known as an actor, “was on assignment for Rolling Stone and he was there to get information that he intended to disseminate to the public." The final product, however, amounted to “an exercise in myth making” and read like a “celebrity profile,” he concluded.
Even veteran journalists come under fire for their choice of interview subjects, as when Megyn Kelly, then at NBC, interviewed Alex Jones in 2017. Although she opened the segment saying Jones “has spent nearly two decades on the fringe, shouting his conspiracy theories into any microphone he could get in front of,” many people were outraged that she would “platform” him.
Simon told me it’s fair to question whether an interviewer has asked appropriate questions and withstood manipulation by the subject of the interview, but the issue of platforming “is a critique of journalism that I don’t accept.” Over the years, he noted, journalists have interviewed people from Pol Pot to Osama Bin Laden and met criticism for doing so.
Smith, at Semafor, said much the same.
“I reject the idea that you shouldn’t interview a person for pretty much any reason — though I did get accused of ‘platforming’ Tucker at one point,” he wrote.
“I think you can be better or worse prepared, ask better or worse or more challenging or more sycophantic questions; but there’s no doubt that it’s useful and interesting to hear from Russian and Iranian leaders, and even the places where those interviews went off the rails — in particular, Putin’s long lecture on Russian history (to Carlson) was incredibly revealing.”
On the Semafor podcast, the CEO of The New York Times said that the job of journalists remains “to hold power to account” — which Smith phrased another way: “to ask hard questions of people in positions of authority.”
“I don’t really think I have any questions for (Alex) Jones right now, but if I did I’d call him up,” Smith said.