Fox News Star Tucker Carlson Featured Prominently in Russian Propaganda Efforts

US media is report­ing on the role that Fox News star Tuck­er Carl­son has been play­ing in Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da efforts dur­ing the inva­sion of Ukraine. Accord­ing to a report in The Intercept:

Feb­ru­ary 25, 2022 In the hours since Rus­sia launched its mil­i­tary assault on Ukraine, the news on Russ­ian state tele­vi­sion has been dom­i­nat­ed by offi­cial state­ments and reports from war cor­re­spon­dents. But in the days lead­ing up to the attack, as the state broad­cast­er worked to tar­nish Ukraine and cast Amer­i­can crit­i­cism of Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin as hys­ter­i­cal, its pro­duc­ers bor­rowed heav­i­ly from anoth­er source: Fox News. At least four times this week, Russ­ian news reports have fea­tured trans­lat­ed clips of Tuck­er Carl­son or his guest Tul­si Gab­bard, a for­mer Demo­c­ra­t­ic U. S. rep­re­sen­ta­tive, attack­ing the Biden admin­is­tra­tion. What’s more, one report broad­cast on Russ­ian television’s main chan­nel Sun­day did more than just quote Carl­son: It devel­oped and sharp­ened a polit­i­cal attack on a promi­nent Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tor that Carl­son had just hint­ed at. At 8 p. m. on Sun­day, a prime­time review of the week’s news pre­sent­ed by Dmit­ry Kise­lev, a bom­bas­tic Putin favorite, fea­tured remarks from the open­ing mono­logue of Carlson’s Feb­ru­ary 17 show, in which the Amer­i­can com­men­ta­tor trashed Ukraine’s gov­ern­ment. “These peo­ple are so ghoul­ish,” Carl­son said of U.S. offi­cials who pro­vid­ed mil­i­tary aid to Ukraine. “Of course they’re pro­mot­ing war,” Carl­son con­tin­ued, as his com­ments were trans­lat­ed into Russ­ian, “not to main­tain the democ­ra­cy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democ­ra­cy. It has nev­er been a democ­ra­cy in its his­to­ry, and it’s not now. It’s a client state of the Biden administration.”

Read the rest here.

The Inter­cept report goes on to high­light one Carl­son broad­cast where his com­ments were sub­ti­tled and re-broad­cast by RT, the state-backed media outlet:

On Wednes­day night, just hours before Putin ordered the attack on Ukraine to begin, two excerpts from Carlson’s most recent pro­gram were fea­tured in Russ­ian state television’s 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. news broad­casts. Carl­son had start­ed his show Tues­day night with a sar­cas­tic mono­logue in which he told view­ers: “Democ­rats in Wash­ing­ton have told you it’s your patri­ot­ic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a sug­ges­tion. It’s a man­date. Any­thing less than hatred for Putin is trea­son. Many Amer­i­cans have obeyed this direc­tive. They now duti­ful­ly hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you’re one of them. Hat­ing Putin has become the cen­tral pur­pose of America’s for­eign pol­i­cy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. Entire cable chan­nels are now devot­ed to it. Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the Unit­ed States into a con­flict in East­ern Europe.”Carlson’s com­ments were so wel­come in Moscow that an excerpt from that rant with Russ­ian sub­ti­tles was quick­ly pro­duced by the Russ­ian-lan­guage ser­vice of RT, the gov­ern­ment-fund­ed net­work for­mer­ly known as Rus­sia Today.

In August 2021, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that Carl­son had spent a week host­ing his show from Budapest, where he gave what was described as a “fawn­ing inter­view” with Vik­tor Orbán, the increas­ing­ly author­i­tar­i­an prime min­is­ter of Hun­gary. Dur­ing the inter­view, Carl­son pro­mot­ed Hun­gary under Orban as a mod­el for the future of the US.

A recent­ly pub­lished Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report doc­u­ments Tuck­er Carl­son’s role in a new and devel­op­ing alliance between US con­ser­v­a­tives and Euro­pean nation­al­ists, seen as a poten­tial vehi­cle for Russ­ian influ­ence operations.