The Fox News host is best positioned to free Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
To win release, Gershkovich needs a champion who has an affinity for Moscow, an operator who has rapport with Vladimir Putin, somebody who isn’t afraid of sticking his neck out, somebody who works for the same media mogul as Gershkovich.
That somebody is Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Why Carlson? He has consistently questioned American involvement in the Ukraine war and is a longtime skeptic of the Russia hawks. He even went so far as to ask in late 2019, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which by the way, I am.” Although Carlson said later in the broadcast that he was kidding, not everybody took it that way — and for good reason. He called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has returned Carlson’s pro-Russia treatment, stroking Fox News for “trying to represent some alternative points of view.”
Carlson continues to criticize the Biden administration at every turn and to pooh-pooh Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. The Kremlin officially endorsed Carlson in 2022, issuing a memo to the Russian media stating it is “essential” to rebroadcast Carlson clips to Russian audiences — even though Russian media was already recycling his stuff.
For more pro-Putin, pro-Russia utterances by Carlson, see David Corn’s piece in Mother Jones.
as we’re stuck with Carlson, perhaps we could put his naïve Russophilia to good work by dispatching him to Moscow to negotiate the Gershkovich case. Surely the Russian government would not oppose a visit from Carlson, whose views align so perfectly with theirs and whose standing in the country amounts to an ad hoc fan club.