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Former Fox News show host and journalist Tucker Carlson has revealed plans to release an interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, explaining that the American public has a right to hear directly from the leader of a nation the US military recently attacked.

Anticipating immense pushback from mainstream media pundits as well as hawkish politicians, Carlson stated, “We know we’ll be criticized for doing this interview. Why did we do it anyway? Well, we did it because we were just at war with Iran 10 days ago, and maybe again.”

He said further in the preview clip of his The Tucker Carlson Show that it was conducted remotely with the help of a translator, and that it will be made public “in a day or two” – which likely means early this coming week.

“And so, our view, which has remained consistent over time, is that American citizens have the constitutional right and the God-given right to all the information they can gather about matters that affect them,” he added in the preview clip introduction.

“Can you believe everything you hear from the president of Iran? Probably not,” Carlson said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, you should be able to decide for yourself whether you believe it or not.”

The full discussion between Carlson and Pezeshkian apparently did not involve questions over the extent to which the Trump-ordered bombing raids impacted Iran’s nuclear development or progress.

Carlson reasoned, “There’s no chance he’s going to answer that question honestly. I didn’t bother to ask it. The answer, in fact, from an American perspective, even from the CIA’s perspective, is unknowable. So we dispense with those.”

“There are all kinds of questions that I didn’t ask the president of Iran, particularly questions to which I knew I could get an not get an honest answer, such as, ‘was your nuclear program totally disabled by the bombing campaign by the US government a week and a half ago?'” he said.

Our interview with the president of Iran.

Watch it first at https://t.co/sLkXnGLauL. pic.twitter.com/SY4KvgA1lb

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) July 5, 2025

“The purpose of the interview was to add to the corpus of knowledge from which Americans can derive their own opinion. Learn everything you can, and then you decide that’s the promise of America,” Carlson said additionally.

One source has pointed out the following…

The former President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was interviewed many, many times by U.S. corporate media.

Why is there a different standard around Tucker Carlson interviewing the President of Iran now? pic.twitter.com/LdzbqzH7mo

— Primo Radical (@PrimoRadical) July 6, 2025

“And we hope that this interview does a small part to making that promise real this interview will be up as soon as we have done editing it as noted and that should be in a day or two.” 

Indeed poll after poll shows that in any given overseas conflict, and especially in cases of so-called preemptive US strikes, the most pro-war demographic among the American public tends to have the least knowledge of the countries they advocate bombing. Often there’s little awareness of basic geography or especially recent history.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

This week, the New York Times experienced an uprising in its ranks and among its readers. The paper was denounced by its own staff and liberal pundits called for the entire editorial staff to be canned.

Why?

Because The New York Times actually reported news that was deemed harmful to the Democrats, specifically Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The newspaper took the additional step of publishing a cringing explanation of why it reported the news that Mamdani lied on his Columbia application in claiming to be black.For liberals, it was an utter nightmare. For a party still defined by identity politics, Mamdani’s false claim over his race left many uncertain about how to react.The left has always maintained a high degree of tolerance for false claims by its own leaders, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren claiming to be a native American to Sen. Richard Blumenthal claiming to have served in the Vietnam War.

The problem is when a news eco-chamber for many readers is shattered by an errant outbreak of journalism. Many Times readers live within a hermetically sealed news silo, relying on MSNBC for cable, The New York Times for print, and BlueSky for social media. You can literally go all day without being exposed to an opposing view or fact. Then suddenly this happens.

The result is often anger. It is the same response many in higher education have to “triggering” views being expressed on campus by conservative or libertarian speakers.

The fact is that the Mamdani story was obvious news—and confirmed by the candidate himself. Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his 2009 Columbia University application, according to the New York Times.

Some accused him of being a fraud while others suggested he was trying to abuse affirmative action.

The Times reported, adding:

Columbia, like many elite universities, used a race-conscious affirmative action admissions program at the time. Reporting that his race was Black or African American in addition to Asian could have given an advantage to Mr. Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and spent his earliest years there.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Mamdani, 33, said he did not consider himself either Black or African American, but rather “an American who was born in Africa.” He said his answers on the college application were an attempt to represent his complex background given the limited choices before him, not to gain an upper hand in the admissions process. (He was not accepted at Columbia.)

Other candidates, like Mayor Eric Adams, went after Mamdani, and the matter has now become an issue in the mayoral election.

The Times readers were outraged to the point that the paper published a lengthy statement from the Times’ assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust, Patrick Healy, attempting to explain why it decided to publish facts that undermined a Democratic candidate. Healy sheepishly explained that “When we hear anything of news value, we try to confirm it through direct sources. Mr. Mamdani confirmed this information in an interview with The Times.”

It did not help. Much like the infamous Cotton scandal, where editors were fired for allowing a Republican senator to print an opposing view on riots, writers and pundits demanded firings or attacked the journalists.

One such response came from Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who attacked the journalists themselves. Not surprisingly, the attack appropriately came on BlueSky, a social media site designed to be a safe place for liberals who do not want to be triggered by opposing views.

Bouie slammed Times reporter, Benjamin Ryan, as stupid, claiming, “Everything I have seen about him screams a guy with little to no actual brain activity.”

After that outrageous attack, Bouie deleted the post, explaining, “I deleted several posts about a Times story because they violated Times social media standards.”

Bouie seems to view Ryan as simply stupid for publishing the truth about the leading candidate for mayor lying about his race. It is the ultimate expression of advocacy journalism. Apparently, the Times should have killed the story to keep readers from knowing about Mamdani’s prior false claim.

In “The Indispensable Right,” I discuss the radical shift in American journalism that occurred with the rejection of neutrality and objectivity in favor of advocacy journalism. J-schools now teach that objectivity is a dated concept. As former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “All journalism is activism.”

After interviewing more than 75 media leaders, Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, detailed how media leaders view neutrality and objectivity as dated concepts that inhibit social and political agendas.

The problem is that once readers become accustomed to an echo chamber, exposure to opposing facts triggers rage.

That was evident among pundits and commentators like former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who declared, “Your absolute abrogation of the NYT standards would in a better era there have led the full range of you in management to resign. Utter failure. Then again, if you don’t realize NYT is perceived as actively campaigning against Mamdani, you’re all lost anyway.”

Ironically, the opposition to Mamdani by some liberals over his anti-Israeli views is being cited as the only reason that the Times would run such a story opposing a leading Democratic candidate. It raises an even more chilling prospect that, absent such a division among Times readers, this story might not have been published.

I hope that that is not true. As many on the left breathe into paper bags from the exposure to an opposing view in the Times, this could prove an important cultural moment for a newspaper that has led the industry toward advocacy journalism.

Many of us still hope that the Times and papers like the Washington Post will still reject advocacy journalism and move back toward objective journalism. However, as this latest controversy demonstrates, that revival will be difficult after years of hiring writers and editors who view neutrality as a relic of journalism.