The Kremlin’s first public response to Tucker Carlson’s announcement that he’s landed an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin was to fact-check the previous Fox Information host.
On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Carlson had certainly interviewed Putin, however took challenge with Carlson’s declare that “not a single Western journalist has bothered” to interview Russia’s president all through the nation’s conflict with Ukraine, which has raged for greater than two years.
“Mr. Carlson will not be appropriate,” Peskov stated in a statement on the interview — which has but to be launched — including that Russia’s authoritarian ruler has acquired “quite a few requests for interviews with the president, however principally, so far as nations within the collective West are involved, these are from main community media: conventional TV channels and enormous newspapers.”
On condition that Carlson’s interview with Putin would be the first sit-down the president has had with a serious Western media determine because the conflict’s outbreak in Feb. 2022, it’s truthful to say these requests have been rejected. In line with Peskov, these conventional media retailers “don’t even try to look neutral of their protection. After all there’s no want to speak with this type of media.”
To recommend Carlson himself has been neutral in his protection of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is laughable, nonetheless, and it’s not arduous to discern why the Kremlin is permitting him however not conventional retailers to interview Putin The previous Fox Information host has a long history of espousing pro-Russian talking points relating to the conflict, even going as far as to assert in 2019 that he was actively “[rooting] for Russia” as tensions escalated between the 2 nations.
So heavy was Carlson’s tilt towards the Russian line of argument that in March of 2022, Mom Jones obtained a Kremlin memo that inspired state-controlled media retailers to “use as a lot as attainable fragments of broadcasts of the favored Fox Information host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the USA [and] NATO, their detrimental function in unleashing the battle in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative habits from the management of the Western nations and NATO in the direction of the Russian Federation and in the direction of President Putin, personally.”
Essential protection of Putin has usually resulted within the illegal detainment — or even the deaths —- of Russian and American journalists. As Carlson waltzes into Moscow for his interview with the notorious autocrat, American journalists, together with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Alsu Kurmasheva and Wall Road Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, stay imprisoned within the nation. Russia’s conflict towards Ukraine has solely amplified the nation’s crackdown on reporters, and several other unbiased retailers and worldwide newsgroups have been pressured to close down their operations within the nation for concern of retaliation.
Peskov claimed on Wednesday that Carlson’s place on the battle with Ukraine is “not pro-Russian by any means, and it’s not pro-Ukrainian; fairly, it’s pro-American. However no less than it stands in clear distinction to the place of the standard Anglo-Saxon media.”
Putin’s refusal to take a seat down with most Western media retailers possible has much less to do with accusations of bias a lot as an unwillingness to be subjected to authentic scrutiny of his authorities. Russia has been accused of committing atrocities and war crimes in its offensive towards Ukraine, together with the illegal executions of civilians. Putin’s authorities can be notorious for its frequent detainment of political rivals and critics, in addition to the cloud of mysterious deaths and poisonings of these in his orbit.
Whether or not Carlson will query Putin on any of those issues stays to be seen. The previous Fox Information host’s historical past of granting softball interviews to controversial influencers, political figures, and authoritarian leaders, signifies that is unlikely. Given all the things we find out about Putin’s propaganda machine, it’s clear that in Carlson, the Russian authorities sees a secure alternative to broadcast its rigorously crafted messaging to American viewers.
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