Russian-Controlled Media Continue to Amplify Tucker’s Carlson’s Pro-Kremlin Rhetoric

Media Mat­ters, a left-lean­ing media watch­dog group, is report­ing on the con­tin­u­ing ampli­fi­ca­tion by Russ­ian-con­trolled media of Fox News star Tuck­er Car­lon’s anti-Ukraine, pro-Krem­lin rhetoric. Accord­ing to their report:

Octo­ber 10, 2022 In the months since the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine began, Russ­ian-con­trolled media have con­sis­tent­ly praised and ampli­fied Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son as a major anti-Ukraine voice in Amer­i­can media. For years, Carl­son has pro­mot­ed pro-Krem­lin, anti-Ukraine rhetoric on his show, and his posi­tion has only inten­si­fied since the start of the war. Carlson’s crit­i­cism wide­ly blames Pres­i­dent Joe Biden for the cri­sis, accus­ing him of inten­tion­al­ly aggra­vat­ing Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin to some­how avenge the 2016 elec­tion. Most recent­ly, Carl­son engaged his prime-time audi­ence in a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that the Unit­ed States sab­o­taged the Nord Stream pipeline. This kicked off the Carl­son-Krem­lin feed­back loop: a recent report in The Wash­ing­ton Post found that Russ­ian state tele­vi­sion aired his com­men­tary about the pipeline at least a dozen times across mul­ti­ple chan­nels. The Russ­ian government’s over­all sup­port for Carl­son was con­firmed in a March 3 memo reveal­ing that Russ­ian state media out­lets fol­low explic­it instruc­tions to ampli­fy Carl­son; as such, they reg­u­lar­ly air clips and praise him as a voice of pro-Krem­lin rea­son in Amer­i­can news. Since before the inva­sion in Feb­ru­ary, Russ­ian media ana­lyst and Dai­ly Beast colum­nist Julia Davis has mon­i­tored Russ­ian state media out­lets, includ­ing doc­u­ment­ing when they men­tion or show a clip from Carlson’s show. So far, Davis has not­ed over 50 instances of Russ­ian state media either show­ing clips of or refer­ring to Tuck­er Carl­son and oth­er Fox per­son­al­i­ties in order to bol­ster sup­port for Rus­sia in its inva­sion of Ukraine. Media Mat­ters also reviewed the work of Fran­cis Scarr, a BBC Russ­ian media ana­lyst.  Below are some exam­ples of Russ­ian state media ampli­fy­ing and cel­e­brat­ing Carlson’s views:

Read the rest here.

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed in Feb­ru­ary on the role that Carl­son has been play­ing in Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da efforts dur­ing the inva­sion of Ukraine.

A GIOR report on the Glob­al Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Alliance (GNCA) detailed Carl­son’s con­tin­ued sup­port for the Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment and its Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orban, Rus­si­a’s clos­est part­ner in the EU. That report also doc­u­ment­ed Carl­son’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ences spon­sored by the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation.