by Ben Whedon
Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson on Tuesday confirmed that he had traveled to Russia to interview President Vladimir Putin, insisting that he had a duty as a journalist to inform people.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and the conflict has persisted to the present with no signs of ending in the near future.
“We’re in Moscow tonight. We’re here to interview the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. We’ll be doing that soon,” he said in a post to X. “There are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously.”
“Here’s why we’re doing it. First, because it’s our job. We’re in journalism. Our duty is to inform people,” he contended. “Two years into a war that’s reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed.”
He further asserted that Americans had a right to know more about the conflict given that their tax dollars had largely financed its continuation.
“The war in Ukraine is a humanitarian disaster,” he went on. Carlson then highlighted the shifting economic and military dynamics of the global political scene that had developed amid the conflict.
“They are history altering developments,” the journalist asserted, before lamenting the apparent ignorance of the western public. “[English-speaking people] think that nothing has really changed. And they think that because no one has told them the truth. Their media outlets are corrupt.”
He then pointed to the litany of sympathetic interviews that western media outlets had conducted with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin.
“Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now. They’ve never heard his voice. That’s wrong,” Carlson insisted. He later insisted that the U.S. government had worked to thwart an earlier attempt to interview Putin.
The interview will be broadcast live and unedited to Carlson’s own website and he plans to place it on X once concluded.
Why I'm interviewing Vladimir Putin. pic.twitter.com/hqvXUZqvHX
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 6, 2024
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Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.
Photo “Tucker Carlson” by Tucker Carlson.