Vladimir Putin grants former Fox host Tucker Carlson his first interview with a Western broadcaster

Four days after police arrested several Russian and Western journalists near Moscow’s Red Square — and with two American correspondents, Evan Gerskovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, imprisoned for months — former Fox broadcaster Tucker Carlson has announced that Vladimir Putin has granted him the first interview to a Western broadcaster since the Kremlin launched its war in Ukraine. “Not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict,” Carlson said after arriving in the Russian capital last weekend, amid great expectation within the Kremlin’s propaganda channels.

Carlson’s statements have garnered an immediate rebuke from journalism professionals. “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,” said CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour on X. Anne Applebaum, a journalist specializing in post-Soviet Union countries, said that Carlson “is not a journalist, he’s a propagandist, with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption.”

“We’re here to interview the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. We’ll be doing that soon. There are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously, so we’ve thought about it carefully over months,” Carlson says in a video on X, recorded from one of Moscow’s most famous tourist spots. “Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now. They’ve never heard his voice,” Carlson adds, despite the fact that several U.S. media outlets, correspondents, and contributors have been covering Russia for years.

The Russian president confirmed to a U.S. reporter during his last annual press conference that Moscow and Washington are in contact over Gerskovich, who was detained in March while reporting in the city where Russia’s main tank factory is located. In addition to the arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter on charges of espionage, Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who was preparing a report on teachers drafted to go to the war in Ukraine, has been imprisoned since last October.

Carlson was one of Fox’s biggest stars before he was fired in April 2023. The network stopped backing Donald Trump’s invective about fraud in the 2020 election, and the ultra-conservative journalist was fired just a week after Fox reached an out-of-court settlement with voting machine company Dominion, which it paid $787.5 million to avoid being tried for defamation.

The presenter set up his own channel, the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN), on X, from where he continues to support Trump’s theses. The former president is the frontrunner to win the Republican nomination to challenge President Joe Biden in the November elections, despite the multiple lawsuits he faces. Conservatives have blocked military and financial aid to Ukraine in the U.S. Congress, along with an immigration plan, a move behind which Biden sees Trump’s hand.

“The post World War Two economic order, the system that guaranteed prosperity in the West for more than 80 years, is coming apart very fast,” Carlson says to denounce sanctions against Russia, without pointing out that the land, sea and air offensive in Ukraine is the biggest war to ravage Europe since the demise of the Third Reich.

“American media outlets have done scores of interviews with Ukrainian President Zelenskiy [...] but the interviews he’s done in the United States are not traditional interviews, they were fawning pep sessions, specifically designed to amplify Zelenskiy’s demans that the U.S. enter more deeply into a war in Eastern Europe and pay for it,” Carlson says, apparently ignoring the fact that U.S. media have revealed, among other things, the differences of opinion between Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian army’s commander in chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi; several cases of corruption; or some of the assassinations and attacks carried out by the Ukrainian security forces on Russian territory.

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