Western Media Prefers Interview With ‘Evil’ Hamas Over Russian President

The fact that a mainstream journalist can air an interview with a Hamas fighter and not with the Russian president reveals the extent of the demonization the leader faces in Western media.

The double standards of Western mainstream media were on vivid display recently when US television network CBS aired several minutes of footage from an interview with a Hamas recruiter, but nothing from journalist Tucker Carlson’s historic interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The discussion with the representative of Hamas, which is heavily stigmatized and labeled as a “terrorist” group in the West, was conducted by CBS foreign correspondent Debora Patta. Clips from the interview were aired twice on CBS news broadcasts – once on the network’s morning news program and again on an evening news broadcast. The sitdown also formed the basis of an article on CBS’ website.

In total, more than 12 minutes of television coverage were dedicated to the interview.

The network’s coverage was peppered with loaded language and inaccuracies typical of Western media when covering the Palestine-Israel conflict; for instance, Patta called the Hamas member’s statement that the group killed no civilians during their October 7 operation a “blatant lie.” Reporting in recent months has revealed that Hamas’ operation targeted Israeli military and police installations, while an investigation in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz discovered that many of the most sensational claims about events that day were fabricated by a discredited Israeli organization known as Zaka.

With many of the civilian casualties on October 7 caused by IDF crossfire and others likely attributable to non-Hamas groups, the statement that Hamas was directly responsible for no civilian casualties on October 7 remains plausible.

Still, if CBS’ reporting on Hamas remained as flawed as ever, at least the network conducted reporting on the group.

Meanwhile, the major broadcaster, along with other US mainstream news outlets, devoted no coverage at all to Tucker Carlson’s interview with the Russian president despite the discussion racking up over two hundred million views online.

The only reference to the interview at all was offered cryptically during a short discussion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s power struggle with former military chief Valery Zaluzhny. During the coverage, an on-screen chyron briefly noted that President Putin had expressed openness to negotiation on the Donbas conflict – a revelation that emerged from Carlson’s historic sitdown.