Russia fawns over Tucker Carlson
While former U.S. President Donald Trump was giving Russia the green light to attack NATO countries, Russian state media were lapping up the attention of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin last week in Moscow. Every one of Carlson’s banal observations made during his visit were broadcast as evidence of Americans’ true feelings about Russia. And as Carlson waxed lyrical about metro stations in Moscow — “there’s no filth, there are no foul smells” — those feelings appeared to be a combination of awe and envy. “How does Russia,” asked Carlson on a video posted on X, “have a subway station that’s nicer than anything in our country?”
I don’t know if Carlson feels the same way about Russian hamburgers, but it was broadcast on prime time news that he visited a branch of “Vkusno i tochka” (translated as “Tasty, that’s it”), a local replacement for McDonald’s, which pulled out of Russia in May 2022. Apparently, he ordered two burgers.
As a Russian journalist in exile, I maintain close contact with people back home. Most people I spoke to had no idea who Carlson was and found the state media’s celebration of an American journalist “weird.” There was even a dissenting voice within the state media. The journalist Andrey Medvedev posted sarcastically in Russian on his Telegram channel: “How wonderful, an American has come to visit us! How happy we are.” A pro-war account on Telegram compared the rapturous Carlson coverage to Soviets who cursed the West but loved blue jeans, rock ‘n’ roll and American movie stars.
Largely, though, the tone of the coverage in state media of Carlson’s quasi-state visit was adoring, like a cargo cult, a Russian friend messaged me, with Carlson playing the charismatic visiting prophet. TASS, a Russian state-owned news agency, reported that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said after Carlson’s interview that “the world has changed.” He meant, despite criticism of the interview in the West, Putin’s message “cannot be blocked” from reaching the world.