Until his departure from Fox News last month, Tucker Carlson was a regular fixture on Russian television news, with clips from his show played across a range of channels and programs. To understand just how extensively his show was repurposed by Russian media, facial recognition technology was used to scan a year of Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian television news totaling more than a quarter-billion seconds of airtime to identify every appearance of his face across seven major channels. Carlson’s visage appeared nearly 27 hours in all, with one major Russian television show excerpting his Fox show in more than a quarter of all broadcasts since the invasion of Ukraine. What can we learn about how Russian television has used these clips?
Since the early weeks of Russia’s invasion, the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive has been archiving a selection of channels documenting the war through the lens of those seven domestic television channels. The Archive began monitoring the channels at slightly different times, yielding a final archive of BelarusTV (5/16/2022 – present), Russia’s Channel One, NTV and Russia 1 (3/26/2022 – present), Russia 24 (4/26/2022 – present) and Russia Today (1/1/2022 – present), along with Ukraine’s Espreso (4/26/2022 – present). Using an open-source facial-recognition tool, this massive archive containing more than 40 million human faces was scanned for all appearances of Tucker Carlson.
The still image above shows a typical excerpt of Carlson’s show on Russia 1’s “60 Minutes”– a clip from Carlson’s January 9, 2023, show appearing at least four times on Russian television the following day, typically displayed on a studio screen to seed the conversation or offer what is presented as the American perspective on the invasion and U.S. domestic politics.
The video below displays a chronological montage of all Carlson clips across the monitored channels – in order, from Jan. 1, 2022, through May 14, 2023. To create the montage, one image every four seconds was extracted from the broadcasts and displayed sequentially at five frames per second without audio to make it easier to understand the topical range of the full 27 hours of excerpts.
Look carefully and you will see the sheer diversity of topics for which Russian television has relied upon Carlson’s show. Domestic politics like transgender issues, diversity, policing and the economy have been regular fixtures, along with stories that present Russia as justified and successful in its invasion.
Looking across the seven channels, Channel One has excerpted Carlson the most, totaling 9.28 hours of airtime, followed by Russia 1 with 6.7 hours. Russia’s English-language international channel Russia Today has excerpted Carlson far less, totaling just 3.4 hours, suggesting an emphasis on the domestic Russian audience. Unsurprisingly, Ukraine’s Espreso has barely excerpted him, while Belarusian television has also excerpted his show sparingly, reflecting that it does not focus on the war nearly to the degree of Russian or Ukrainian television.
The timeline below breaks this down by day, capturing the newsy nature of these excerpts, with waves of appearances and one-day surges reflecting Russia’s interest in specific storylines that either promote its invasion narratives or promulgate an image of the U.S. as a nation in disarray. Excerpts pick up in late 2022; Carlson’s departure from Fox was widely covered as well.
In the end, Russian television’s embrace of Tucker Carlson demonstrates how domestic U.S. news media can be repurposed to advance the narratives and interests of nations across the world – and the degree to which the narratives of Carlson’s show aligned with those of the Russian government.
