Tucker Carlson’s Interview With President Putin Provokes an Uproar — Even Before It Is Aired

Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, the first with a Western reporter since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, is to be posted tomorrow free of charge on Mr. Carlson’s website and on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Although the content is so far a secret, the interview is already creating an international uproar.Supporters of Mr. Carlson’s brand of populist isolationism hail it as a blow for freedom of the press. Political analysts hail it as a clever step for Presidents Putin and Trump in their reelection campaigns. Kremlin state TV talking heads put American “hysteria” over the interview on a par with Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi in 1972.American and British reporters who have been scooped charge that the conservative is known for his sympathy to the Russian dictator and is not the man to pitch hardball questions in the Kremlin. After Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson said on Fox that he was “rooting” for Russia to win, something he has later qualified repeatedly.A poster and toilet paper with the likeness of President Putin hang on the wall at a facility in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson’s Putin interview will be the first since Russia invaded Ukraine. Scott Olson/Getty ImagesTwo weeks after the invasion, Mother Jones posted excerpts of a 12-page Kremlin memo sent to state-run TV. It said: “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine.”After Fox fired Mr. Carlson for still unspecified reasons, Russian state TV offered to hire him as a commentator. This week, “mainstream media” reporters bridled at Mr. Carlson’s comment on X that “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview” the Russian president. Yet the BBC’s Russia Editor, Steve Rosenberg, posted on X that BBC has “lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”CNN’s Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour also posted on X: “Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full scale invasion of Ukraine? It’s absurd — we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now.”For Mr. Carlson’s supporters this is more than sour grapes about a big scoop. It illustrates the one-sided, anti-Russia bias of “corporate American media.” Wrote Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on X: “This is what REAL journalism looks like from @TuckerCarlson. And @elonmusk is protecting free speech and free press on this platform by allowing Tucker to interview Vladimir Putin.” Ms. Greene’s X homepage features a photo of her, Mr. Carlson, and former President Trump.A radically different view comes from a former American congressman, Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Mr. Trump in January 2021. Mr. Kinzinger, an Air Force veteran, retired from Congress when he faced near-certain loss at the polls. He posted last weekend about Mr. Carlson’s trip to Moscow: “He is a traitor.” For Russia’s state press, the conservative American’s interview with Mr. Putin is a breakthrough moment. “Americans are in shock,” asserts a host on Solovyov Live, a major talk show. “How did one of the best-known American journalists, Tucker Carlson, suddenly end up in Russia somehow, and even went to the Bolshoi Theater to see the ‘Spartacus’ ballet?”America-based journalist John Varoli, who also appeared on the program, told The New York Sun today: “Are we are just going to listen to Kiev? We have to listen more to what Russia has to say. We have to listen to what Crimea has to say, what Donbas has to say.”In Putin’s Russia, where cold political calculus rules, analysts say the timing of the interview was designed to boost the candidacies of Presidents Putin and Trump. Russia’s presidential election takes place between March 15 and March 17. A Berlin-based Russia analyst, Janis Kluge, posted on X: “Carlson is smart and his agenda is clear. He and Putin will work together brilliantly to reinforce the false narrative about Ukraine, weaken Biden, and strengthen Trump.” He concluded: “Their main message will come in just the right dose: Peace in Ukraine is easily possible without Zelensky and without Biden.”The interview is to be posted free of charge on Mr. Carlson’s website and on X. Once the most popular cable news host in America, winning 5 million viewers, Mr. Carlson has largely rebuilt his audience since leaving Fox. For an encore to the Moscow interview, he has asked for an interview with President Zelensky of Ukraine.Critics say that Mr. Carlson is making deliberately false comments about press freedom in Russia. On Saturday, when the visiting American went to the Bolshoi, about 20 Russian reporters were briefly detained outside the Kremlin walls for covering an anti-war protest by wives and mothers of draftees fighting in Ukraine. When Mr. Carlson interviewed Mr. Putin at the Kremlin, a Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, was four miles away, sitting in a jail cell at Lefortovo prison. In March, he is to mark one year of incarceration without trial. Elsewhere in Russia, another American reporter, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Alsu Kurmasheva, is in jail awaiting trial.Immediately after the February 24, 2022, invasion, the Kremlin cracked down on the press, forcing independent Russian news agencies to close and expelling many foreign correspondents. To them, Mr. Carlson’s press critique seemed naïve at best, mendacious at worst.“Unbelievable! I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine,” a journalist and political scientist Yevgenia Albats, posted yesterday on X.

Tucker Carlson’s Interview With President Putin Provokes an Uproar — Even Before It Is Aired

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