My guest co-host today is Tony Kynaston from the QAV Investing Podcast. We’re talking about the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin and breaking down the lies, distortions and misinformation ABOUT the interview that we’re reading in the mainstream media, and asking why there is a need to distort Putin’s words in the West. Transcript BS 123 [00:00:00] Tony: 3, [00:00:12] Tony: 2, 1. [00:00:13] Cameron: Welcome to the B******t Filter episode 123 Special edition because, uh, Ray has been replaced [00:00:23] Cameron: with a, uh, smarter, better looking version of Ray, uh, my o my other Ray Tony [00:00:30] Cameron: Kynaston, and welcome to the B******t [00:00:33] Cameron: Filter, Tony. [00:00:35] Tony: Thank you, Cam. Thanks for the invite. And I, I feel special [00:00:39] Cameron: Uh, you invited, you, you, you invited yourself? I think, uh, [00:00:43] Cameron: actually, yeah. Yeah. [00:00:45] Tony: I do. [00:00:46] Cameron: We had a lot, we had a lot of people offered to come on, and I appreciate everyone’s offers, but I did say condition was, you had to watch the Putin interview. No one else, uh, seemed to be up for that. Tony goes, yeah, I can do that. [00:00:58] Cameron: So he [00:01:00] Tony: And that, and that was a high price to [00:01:01] Tony: pay too, by the way. [00:01:02] Cameron: Was it? [00:01:03] Tony: Well, I didn’t mind listening to Putin, but [00:01:06] Tony: Tucker Carlson, gimme a break. [00:01:09] Cameron: Well, the, the upside is he didn’t, didn’t have much to say in the two [00:01:13] Tony: it was a, I think a, a journalist would call that a softball interview. [00:01:17] Cameron: Well, they’ve called it much, much worse than that. But look, and, and here’s, you know, there’s, there’s a couple of reasons for me being interested in this. Uh, number one. [00:01:28] Cameron: Yeah. Uh, Putin’s obviously a, a major player in global geopolitics right now, and we don’t get to actually hear from him very often in the west. [00:01:40] Cameron: Uh, and this is the first interview that an American journalist has got with him in over two years since the, this latest phase of the war, uh, began, the invasion began. Um, secondly, uh, you know, I think he’s, uh, he’s an interesting character. You, you know, you, you, you don’t run Russia for twenty-five years or whatever it’s been now, um, without having something going on. [00:02:10] Cameron: He’s a smart canny player. Brutal, probably. And thirdly, and this is, I guess the main focus I want to give is just the level of outrage in the Western media about. Interview itself, even existing about Carlson doing the interview and, uh, and, and the outrage about the things that Putin allegedly said, which he didn’t actually say, I think, in the interview. [00:02:45] Cameron: So I wanna cover the media coverage of it, and that’s kinda what the b******t Filter originally was about, was looking at media coverage of big stories in the West and picking them apart to see if they’re providing a fair and reasonable, uh, coverage of the stories or if it’s b******t. And I’ve read a lot of new stories about this and, and by and large, uh, I’m calling b******t on a lot of it. [00:03:12] Cameron: Anyway, let’s start with the interview, Tony. Um, I mean, I, you and I, I don’t think have talked a great deal about we, uh, Putin or Russia or Ukraine. Do you wanna give me your high level view on what’s been going on over there for the last 10 years? [00:03:31] Tony: I’m not sure I can or I’m qualified. You, you probably know that far better than I [00:03:36] Cameron: No. [00:03:36] Cameron: one on this show has ever qualified [00:03:38] Tony: yeah. [00:03:38] Cameron: anything, don’t he? [00:03:40] Tony: Well, you talk interesting, you said 10 years. I assume you’re referring back to the last time the [00:03:45] Tony: government changed when, um, uh, Russia, annexed Crimea, and then there was a bit of a coup around that time as Well, Is that what you’re talking about? Is that why you said 10 years? [00:03:55] Cameron: Well, uh, yeah. So Putin’s view, and, and I [00:03:59] Cameron: tend to agree with him, is that in 2014 in Ukraine there was a coup, it was a US. [00:04:05] Cameron: Uh, supported, if not engineered coup. There was an earlier coup, it was a 2004 coup, then there was the 2014 coup, uh, both led slash supported slash engineered, we believe by the, I believe by the United States. [00:04:22] Cameron: To what degree? It’s hard to say, but there seems to be sufficient evidence to say that they were involved to some degree. Um, but you know, it’s the last 10 years is really when the Donbass situation became a thing. The Crimea became a thing, et cetera, et [00:04:38] Cameron: cetera. Yeah. [00:04:40] Tony: Yeah, I found it really hard to, to get to the truth, I guess, on the Donbass thing. I remember, um, when the, uh, probably prior to the Ukraine war, um, starting, I, I did hear some interviews. I think it was on the BBC World Service with, uh, which alleged that there was a flood of. Russian-speaking, um, Russian-affiliated Ukrainians crossing the border back into Russia. [00:05:09] Tony: And that, that was because of alleged persecution from neo-Nazis in Ukraine on that sort of border region. And therefore, that was the justification for Putin having to take action. So, um, I tried to look up those articles in preparation for this and I couldn’t find them. So I can’t really talk about it in depth, but, but it’s, to me, it’s really hard to, to drill down and find out exactly what’s going on. [00:05:35] Tony: Um, uh, it, it’s been hard as it always is in, I guess in a wartime situation. It’s been hard to get even accurate information about what’s going on in Ukraine during the war. And I probably relied a bit more on Al Jazeera for, for news on that rather than the Western media. Um, now Al Jazeera does have its problems too, but at least it was reporting issues like that. [00:05:58] Tony: Pretty failure. And it was actually quite riveting the way they were reporting they were on the ground in the early days, reporting as, as suburb by suburb. The Russians started to get close to Kiev and, and get into Kiev and what was going on there. So that was, that was far better than the Western journalism. [00:06:15] Tony: Um, and it was far more independent. So, uh, listening to the Putin interview, I think it was really interesting when he started to talk about his point of view on things like, uh, the, uh, the visit of Zelensky to the Canadian Parliament when the speaker and the Canadian parliament, uh, praised a, a war hero who turned out to be a, um, a Nazi or a neo-Nazi. [00:06:39] Tony: A Nazi, I think actually. And then the speaker had to resign. So that didn’t get, that was the first time I’d heard of that. That didn’t get much coverage over here at all. So there is obviously two sides to every story. And I think, you know, it’s a show like this, which is good to pull it apart because. You know, as, as you know, it’s, um, the media is one of the institutions that manipulates us in, in our points of view and our, our lifestyles. [00:07:03] Tony: And definitely in the West, that can be shaped by just straight capitalism and who, uh, who is paying for what ads in the media and, and who, what kind of agendas are they pushing and what kind [00:07:16] Tony: of, uh, you know, political, uh, persuasions are they pushing and or do they have allegiances to or do they control? [00:07:23] Tony: So it’s a, it’s a big issue. [00:07:25] Cameron: mm It is, and it it, you know, I guess part of the reason [00:07:31] Cameron: for me being interested in doing this show [00:07:33] Cameron: is, uh, you know, the historian side of me knows how I. Regularly Western populations have been lied to historically during wars, uh, going back to World War I all the way through to, you know, Vietnam, um, and the, the Gulf Wars. [00:07:53] Cameron: And, you know, there seems to be this fascinating cycle where we go through a war, we go through a conflict that we’re either directly involved in or indirectly involved in. And the government of the day and the media of the day spin a whole bunch of propaganda about it. We find out years later that they lied or spun or manipulated or there was no evidence for WMD and, you know, the attacks on this ship or that ship weren’t really [00:08:25] Cameron: attacks ill that Yeah. [00:08:28] Cameron: And, and the media says Mia culpa will never do that again. I. And the people tend to say, wah-ha. Now we understand that we will never be lied to again. And then the cycle just repeats. You know, within a decade there’s another incident and the media jump on board. The governments jump on board and the people just go along for the ride and believe everything again. [00:08:50] Cameron: And inevitably a few years later they’ll go, oh no, we were lied to. Oh, [00:08:53] Cameron: never again, you know? [00:08:56] Tony: Well, you raised some great points, Cam, and they’re pertinent to this topic as well. And you know, it’s interesting, I think that there is no crime of misrepresentation in journalism, even though journalists will always say, we need to get to the facts and we want to, um, report them objectively, and we need two sources and we need hard evidence if none of those things happen. [00:09:16] Tony: They get off Scot-free, and in fact, if they don’t happen, their readership may actually go up. So that’s, that’s the first thing to, to address what you’ve said. But the second thing about what you’re saying as well is that, particularly in this case, there’s an awful lot of
