Last spring, it seemed as if Tucker Carlson had reached the end of his passion Path through American media and politics.
Fox News canceled its top-rated show, depriving Mr. Carlson of his nightly prime-time platform. But it locked him into a contract worth more than $15 million a year that prohibited him from taking a job with a rival.
Under old media rules, Mr. Carlson would be off the air and out of sight until the end of the 2024 election, when his contract expires. But Mr. Carlson is not your typical television star. And what was once normal in his industry is becoming increasingly archaic and shaken by the new rules – or lack thereof – in the fragmented online media world.
With an exclusive interview with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday on the social network
The two-hour interview gave him a megaphone for an American audience as many Republicans in Congress worked to block a vital lifeline of American military assistance to Ukraine.
This also achieved Mr. Carlson’s goal of getting back into the limelight. For the first time since his defenestration at Fox, his name was on the lips of major national and international figures, the kind of notoriety that Mr. Carlson has long enjoyed.
Hillary Clinton called him “a useful idiot” and Mr. Putin’s “bitch” in an interview with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner this week.
Mr. Carlson gave Mr. Putin space for uninterrupted discussions of longstanding and decidedly one-sided grievances about Ukraine’s origins and independence movements. But Mr. Carlson occasionally pressed questions, to Mr. Putin’s visible anger, on, among other things, why Russia jailed Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, and questioned Mr. Putin’s claim that Mr. Gershkovich was a spy.
Whether the interview increases Mr. Carlson’s reputation in the long term remains to be seen.
The interview with Mr. Putin will serve as a kind of promotion for his streaming site, which he founded in December and which costs subscribers $9 a month. Tucker Carlson Network is an attempt to replicate the business model of other conservative figures like Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro, who have built standalone digital platforms outside of traditional media. Mr. Carlson is working with Red Seat Ventures, a company whose clients include Ms. Kelly, Bari Weiss and Nancy Grace, to handle advertising sales on the new platform.
So far, however, Mr. Carlson’s self-produced interviews on
His waning power appeared to be at least one of the reasons Fox didn’t do more to stop his new venture, even though Fox said it violated the terms of his contract. (Mr. Carlson’s lawyers have argued that Fox originally breached his contract and that his online show falls within his free speech rights.)
If Fox were to file a case against Mr. Carlson, it could give him the opportunity to claim that his former “corporate media” overlords, as he likes to call them, tried to censor him. It’s exactly the kind of argument that matters to Mr. Carlson’s fan base, resembling a political movement in its own right and giving Mr. Carlson an influence that few other television stars have.
It was that influence that made Mr. Carlson such a boon to Mr. Trump — and Mr. Putin — during his time at Fox News.
Mr. Carlson has been the network’s most prominent proponent of pro-Russian arguments, including his claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator who the West is using to undermine Russia – a view he reiterated in his interview with Mr. Putin expressed.
But his propagandistic style also took him to the limits of cable television.
His involvement in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox, which ended for $787 million – and the pre-trial discovery of a text by Mr Carlson that expressed inflammatory views on violence and race – influenced his company bosses Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch Her decision cut his show short.
Mr. Musk quickly jumped in, making Mr. Carlson the first host of a long-form video show on X.
Mr. Musk concluded the purchase of “Free speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Carlson, who praised him for “restoring free speech online.”
At And Mr. Musk has shown no concern about content that could turn off advertisers. (X has offered packages that cost $300,000 for ads in four of Mr. Carlson’s videos and up to $1.5 million for ads in 48 videos, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.)
Mr. Carlson pushed and ultimately exceeded the limits of what the Murdochs could allow on their network. It’s not close to that limit for Mr. Musk, who has reinstated thousands of previously suspended accounts that spread misinformation about health and elections, which coincided with a rise in racist and anti-Semitic messages on the social network. On Thursday, Mr. Musk, the most followed user on the platform, shared Mr. Putin’s interview with his followers.
Mr. Carlson’s show has featured guests like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who have violated content moderation policies on many social media platforms – including Twitter, as X was called before Mr. Musk bought it, and most of these abolished guidelines.
Other guests included independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who each received a supportive reception from Mr. Musk at the X.
This shared perspective at times extended to Ukraine and Russia. Mr. Musk has angered Ukrainians by suggesting they negotiate peace, which they equate with allowing Mr. Putin to keep Ukrainian territory he seized with bloody and illegal force.
And although Mr. Musk has granted Ukraine use of his Starlink satellite system for combat communications, he has admitted he blocked its use for a planned attack against Russia in the Black Sea last year. Mr. Putin, in turn, praised Mr. Musk as a “talented businessman.”
Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, had similarly warm words for Mr. Carlson this week, saying that Mr. Putin granted him an interview — which Mr. Carlson had sought since his time at Fox — because Mr. Carlson “has the position of Mr “contrasts traditional, Anglo-Saxon media.”
Mr. Peskov refuted Mr. Carlson’s false claim that he was the first Western media figure to interview Mr. Putin since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago because journalists had not bothered to ask. Numerous Western media outlets have made these inquiries, including The Times.
But Mr. Peskov agreed with Mr. Carlson that traditional media “cannot boast of attempts to appear even unbiased.”
Russia has defined impartiality as sticking to its official line, with deviation from it facing the decidedly censorious penalty of prison. This violates traditional journalistic standards – standards that Mr. Carlson at X does not have to concern himself with.
The interview certainly seems to attract a large audience. The test will be whether it leads to more subscriptions and interest in his show in the future — and if not, how Mr. Carlson will try to outdo himself at his next appearance.
Kate Conger contributed reporting.
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2024-02-09 02:03:51
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