Tucker Carlson is going where few journalists have gone before: to interview Vladimir Putin.
On Tuesday, former Fox News top host Tucker Carlson confirmed that he is in Moscow, Russia, to interview its president, Vladimir Putin. He criticized Western journalists for pedaling “pep sessions” to rally support for more money for Ukraine despite English speakers being “mostly unaware” of the actual situation.
Carlson’s critics are many, mostly on the Left, but also some on the Right. He was the highest-rated show host on cable news for years due to his witty personality, brash assertiveness, and willingness to “tell it like it is” to viewers.
The legacy media could not handle him, feared him, and wanted him out of the spotlight. Leftist media arms of the government like Yahoo News slander him with labels like “pro-Kremlin” and accuse him of “promoting conspiracies,” “flirting with right-wing grifters,” and spreading “racially-tinged disinformation.”
Last April, allegedly right-wing cable news network Fox News booted their star out of the blue. This was a clear indication that the channel was starting to lose its conservative convictions, as it canned its most conservative commentator. This move, of course, plummeted its ratings, slashing it almost in half from an average of 2.6 million views a day to 1.6 million. Fox News now proudly announces its ratings are able to still barely maintain its status with between 1 and 3 million regular viewers.
Meanwhile, Carlson confirmed the legacy media’s fears when he quickly founded Tucker Carlson Network on Elon Musk’s impartial social media network X shortly after his removal to immediate success. His first episode and his interview with former president Donald Trump that took place during a GOP primary debate both blew up the internet, the latter standing at 267 million views at the time of this piece’s writing. Since then, his regular episodes have still regularly outpaced and outshined those of all the legacy media networks by millions.
Carlson succeeds where the legacy media does not because he is not a routine liar, and everyone knows it. Public trust in the media is at a record low of 32%, according to Axios. Of course, Russian media should not be fully trusted, but neither should Western media. The latter either blatantly lies to the public, as it did with the Russia hoax to discredit Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, or it lies through the omission of information, as it did with Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal during the 2020 election.
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Carlson joins the crew of the great journalists of our time, such as James O’Keefe, who was booted from Project Veritas for similar reasons, and Chaya Raichik, who runs LibsOfTikTok on X, who dare to break the establishment media mold and expose the actual truth.
If we, as conservatives, are going to tout ourselves as those who truly understand and try to fight for free speech, then we should fight for Tucker Carlson, too. He is doing what no one else in the media has been willing to do.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner Winter Fellow.