Last spring, it looked like Tucker Carlson might have reached the end of his streak route through American media and politics.
Fox News canceled his top-rated show, depriving Mr. Carlson of his prime-time nightly platform. But it kept him under a contract, worth more than $15 million a year, that prohibited him from taking a job with a rival.
Under the old legacy media rules, Mr. Carlson would have been off the air and out of sight until after the 2024 election, when his contract expired. But Mr. Carlson is no typical TV star. And what was once normal in his industry is increasingly archaic, shattered by the new rules—or lack thereof—of the fractured world of online media.
In an exclusive interview with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — released Thursday on the X social network and Mr. Carlson’s own streaming site, the Tucker Carlson Network — the host returned, at least for a moment, to the center of American policy.
The two-hour interview endeared him to the American public, just as many congressional Republicans worked to block a vital lifeline of US military aid to Ukraine.
It also achieved Mr. Carlson’s goal of regaining the limelight. For the first time since his repudiation by Fox, his name was again on the lips of major national and international figures, the kind of buzz Mr. Carlson had long thrived on.
Hillary Clinton, in an interview this week with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, called him “a useful idiot” and Mr. Putin’s “puppy dog.”
Mr. Carlson gave Mr. Putin room for incessant questioning about longstanding and arguably one-sided allegations about the origins and independence movements of Ukraine. But Mr. Carlson occasionally pressed, to Mr. Putin’s visible annoyance, including why Russia was jailing Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, challenging Mr. Putin’s claim that Mr. Gershkovich was a spy.
Whether the interview raises Mr. Carlson’s standing in the long run remains to be seen.
The interview with Mr. Putin will serve as an advertisement for his website, which he launched in December and costs subscribers $9 a month. The Tucker Carlson Network is an attempt to replicate the business model of other conservative personalities like Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro, who have created standalone digital platforms outside of traditional media. Mr. Carlson is working with Red Seat Ventures, a firm that counts Ms. Kelly, Bari Weiss and Nancy Grace among its clients, to handle advertising sales on the new platform.
Until now, however, Mr. Carlson’s self-produced interviews at X — which lack the slick production values he once enjoyed on cable — haven’t had the same obvious influence on the national conversation that he has on Fox News.
His waning power seemed to be at least part of the reason Fox hadn’t done more to stop his new endeavor, even though Fox said he was violating the terms of his contract. (Mr. Carlson’s lawyers argued that Fox breached his contract in the first place and that his webcast fell within his free speech rights.)
If Fox pursued a case against Mr. Carlson, that could give him an opening to claim that his former “corporate media” bosses, as he likes to call them, were trying to censor him. It’s exactly the kind of argument that plays to Mr. Carlson’s fan base, which is like a political movement in itself, giving him leverage afforded to few other television stars.
It was that leverage that made Mr. Carlson such a boon to former President Donald J. Trump — and Mr. Putin — during his tenure at Fox News.
Mr. Carlson has been the network’s most prominent proponent of pro-Russian arguments, including his claim that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is a dictator the West is using to undermine Russia — a view he echoed again in his interview with Mr. Putin.
But his propagandistic style also took him to the limits of cable television.
His involvement in the defamation suit against Fox, which Dominion Voting Systems settled for $787 million — and the preliminary discovery of a text from Mr. Carlson that conveyed incendiary views about violence and race — influenced his corporate bosses, Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch, in their decision to cut his show.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, quickly stepped in to make Mr. Carlson the first host of a long-form video show on the platform.
Mr. Musk completed the purchase of X in late 2022, promising to make it an absolute “free speech” zone, a promise he repeated when he was on Mr. Carlson’s Fox show shortly before it was canceled in April. “Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy,” Mr. Musk explained to Mr. Carlson, who hailed him for “restoring free speech on the internet.”
At X, Mr. Musk could offer Mr. Carlson a freer level of speech, in part because online platforms like his have more legal protection from defamation suits like the one brought by Dominion against Fox. And Mr. Musk has shown no concern about content that might alienate advertisers. (X has offered packages costing $300,000 for ads on four of Mr. Carlson’s videos and up to $1.5 million for ads on 48 videos, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.)
Mr. Carlson pushed and eventually broke the boundaries of what the Murdochs could allow on their network. It hasn’t come close to that limit for Mr. Musk, who has brought back thousands of previously kicked out accounts promoting health and election misinformation, matching a surge in racist and anti-Semitic messages on the social network. On Thursday, Mr. Musk, the most followed user on the platform, shared the interview with Mr. Putin with his followers.
Mr. Carlson’s show featured guests, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who broke the content moderation policies of several social media platforms — including Twitter, as X was known before Mr. Musk bought it and eliminated most of these policies.
Other guests include independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, each of whom received a supportive welcome from Mr. Musk at the X.
This common perspective was extended from time to time to Ukraine and Russia. Mr Musk has angered Ukrainians by suggesting they negotiate for peace, which they equate with allowing Mr Putin to keep Ukrainian territory he seized through bloody and illegal violence.
And although Mr Musk has granted Ukraine use of its Starlink satellite system for battlefield communications, he has acknowledged blocking its use for a planned strike against Russia in the Black Sea last year. Mr Putin, in turn, praised Mr Musk as a “talented businessman”.
Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, had similarly warm words for Mr. Carlson this week, saying that Mr. Putin granted him an interview — which Mr. Carlson had been seeking since his time at Fox — because the Mr. Carlson “contrasts with the position of traditional, Anglo-Saxon media”.
Mr Peskov shot down Mr Carlson’s false suggestion that he was the first Western media figure to interview Mr Putin since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago because journalists had not bothered to they ask. Many Western media outlets have made these requests, including the Times.
But Mr. Peskov agreed with Mr. Carlson that traditional media “cannot boast of trying to even appear impartial.”
Russia has defined impartiality as adherence to its official line, deviance from which risks the arguably censorious penalty of imprisonment. This flies in the face of traditional journalistic standards – standards that Mr. Carlson does not have to deal with on X.
The interview looks sure to attract a large audience. The test will be whether it leads to more subscriptions and interest in his show going forward — and if not, how Mr. Carlson will try to outdo himself for his next plunge.
Kate Conger contributed to the report.
