CNN’s Chris Wallace could barely conceal his distaste for former colleague Tucker Carlson’s softball interview with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin this week.
The two media personalities worked together at Fox News and there was no love lost between them, with Carlson once referring to Wallace as “a bitchy little man.”
“Tucker Carlson showed up in Moscow to interview Vladimir Putin. It turned out to be anything but an interview,” Wallace said Saturday. “Putin droned on for two hours and seven minutes while Tucker sat there like an eager puppy. Occasionally, but rarely, he got in a question.”
Wallace continued, “But more telling than what Tucker asked is what he didn’t ask. Nothing about why Putin invaded a sovereign country, nothing about targeting civilians, nothing about Russian war crimes. A reporter can ask Putin a tough question if he wants a real interview.”
Wallace then cut to a clip when he interviewed Putin, asking, “Why is it that so many of the people that oppose Vladimir Putin end up dead or close to it?”
“But apparently that’s not why Tucker went to Moscow. During the Cold War, gullible Westerners who spread Soviet propaganda were dismissed as ‘useful idiots.’ But calling Tucker that is unfair to useful idiots. He’s made a cynical decision to chase MAGA’s affection for dictators, and what better way to cash in than Putin’s Kremlin.
Bret Stephens with The New York Times agreed with Wallace.
“What you saw there…you’re looking at the Tokyo Rose of our day, basically broadcasting fascist propaganda to credulous people in the West who are eager to buy into the mythology of Putin as a champion of the Nordic races against their enemies, and as an enemy of wokeness,” he said. “It’s one of the most disgraceful — to call it a journalistic performance is wrong because he’s not a journalist. I don’t even think it was a performance. It was just simply being a scribe to one of the most vicious dictators of our time.”
The panelists agreed that Carlson used to interview “to make himself relevant” again after his shock firing from Fox News in April related to defamation and harassment.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
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