On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, conservative media commentator Tucker Carlson used his nightly Fox News platform to ask why the Democratic establishment was being hostile towards Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington have told you it’s your patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin,” Carlson said.
“Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason.”
A day earlier, former US president Donald Trump shared an equally unusual take on a conservative radio show, seeming to praise Putin’s “peacekeeping” operation in Ukraine’s separatist-held regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as “genius” and “very savvy”.
Carlson’s surprising new audience
After Carlson’s comments aired on Fox News, American journalist Robert Mackey counted four separate instances of translated clips from Tucker Carlson Tonight appearing in Russian news reports in under a week.
After researching the interplay between Fox News and the Republican Party for more than a decade, Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at media watchdog Media Matters, said he was not surprised.
He recalled right-wing media commentators comparing Mr Putin’s strength with the perceived softness of then-president Barack Obama, a Democrat, and sees the cable network’s recent coverage as a more extreme version of the same impulse.
“They were contrasting him with the particular type of masculinity that they saw in Putin — with his judo and posing shirtless on a horse — and using him as a foil to make Barack Obama look bad,” Mr Gertz said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-13/how-putin-infiltrated-republican-party-and-fox-news/100902786