Tucker Carlson’s Defense of Glenn Greenwald is Missing Something

Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered a defense of frequent guest Glenn Greenwald after the left-wing journalist was charged in Brazil over his reporting on government corruption. One name that was conspicuously absent from Carlson’s defense: Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil who has made Greenwald a target.

“Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for The Intercept, has been on this show many times,” Carlson said at the end of his Wednesday night program. “He was charged in Brazil yesterday. He’s been accused of committing a series of crimes — printing text messages between government leaders as part of an expose on official corruption there. Now if convicted, he faced a long term in some of the harshest prisons in the world. He could die in them.”

We’re rooting for Glenn Greenwald. pic.twitter.com/5rDQKSSl3a

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 23, 2020

From there, Carlson commended Greenwald for staying in Brazil to fight the charges, then applauded Greenwald’s criticism of the Trump-Russia investigation. There was no mention of who is threatening Greenwald with death in prison: Bolsonaro, who said this week that the American journalist could be jailed in Brazil.

So far, the Trump administration has been mum on Greenwald’s persecution. Given Trump’s sympathies towards Bolsonaro, that’s not surprising. But Carlson’s defense of Greenwald rings somewhat hollow — even hypocritical, to use a word that Carlson wields as his sharpest weapon — when he ignores the culpability of Brazil’s far right government. Carlson did not respond to requests for comment.

Greenwald and Bolsonaro have a long and bitter history that helps explain why he’s being targeted. The journalist laid it out in an interview with the New Yorker this week:

I actually wrote about Bolsonaro all the way back in 2014, in an article he hated, before anyone contemplated that he might be President. I was just trying to explain to people how someone this extreme was even a member of Congress. The title was, “The Most Misogynistic, Hateful Elected Official in the Democratic World: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.” And then, in 2017, while he was setting up his Presidential run, I called him a fascist on Twitter, and he responded with an extremely crude and anti-gay epithet about anal sex that made news. And then, when my husband entered Congress as a left-wing member, in early 2019, replacing another L.G.B.T. congressman, who fled the country in fear of his life, largely due to Bolsonaro, David and he had a back-and-forth that went viral in Brazil. So he already hated me before we started this reporting.

And once we did this reporting, he said my marriage was a fraud and that we adopted Brazilian children as a fraud to avoid deportation. And then of course he has threatened I would be in prison over the reporting. So we have a long and contentious history.

It’s commendable that Carlson took time out of his show to defend Greenwald — he’s the only personality on cable news who has done so since the charges of “cybercrimes” were reported by the New York Times on Tuesday. What’s strange is that he avoided implicating Bolsonaro, a figure who has been celebrated on Fox News as “the Trump of the tropics” and has since proven correct those who warned that his populist presidency would more closely resemble a dictatorship.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.