Carlson Faces Heavy Criticism for Sit Down With Putin

(NewsSpace.com) – Tucker Carlson isn’t afraid to make waves. He’s proven it time and again with his coverage of hot-button issues and his willingness to take on a large media company in favor of his own show on X, formerly Twitter. Recently, he decided to sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he’s received a lot of backlash for doing so.

When Carlson announced that he was in Russia, planning to interview Putin, it set off a firestorm of reactions, particularly since the former Fox News anchor said Western media outlets weren’t giving the Russian leader a platform to tell his story. However, that’s already been debunked, as many journalists have already interviewed him, and some have even been jailed for their efforts. Others, like CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, say they have been trying to interview him since he launched the invasion.

Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Traofimov, posted a sarcastic message in response to Carlson on X, saying, “Poor, poor Vladimir Putin,” for not being able to state his reasons, “Not in the speech that was broadcast live on every global network the morning of the invasion, and not in countless others.”

Russia has consistently shot down interview requests from American journalists and only chose Carlson because he has a different position than the rest of those who asked, according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary. Indeed, Anne Applebaum, another American journalist, called Carlson “a propagandist with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption.”

Many journalists have interviewed Putin, who also makes frequent, widely covered speeches. Carlson's interview is different because he is not a journalist, he's a propagandist, with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption. https://t.co/5KLTtWV2CE

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) February 6, 2024

Carlson published the supposedly unedited interview on his personal website on February 8. It lasted 127 minutes, and the pair covered many topics. When it aired on Russian media, however, it was edited to cover up Putin’s mistakes. For one, he said Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s father served in World War II, when he wasn’t even born until after it ended, and removed a section of the discussion where Putin blamed Poland for Adolf Hitler’s invasion.