Fox "News" and the Jokerfication of Tucker Carlson (with Kat Abughazaleh)
Neither fair nor balanced.
Just because “Fox News” contains the word “news” doesn’t make it news. The Shipping News isn’t news. Neither is The Bad News Bears. We all understand that those are works of fiction, telling stories that are not real. We now know for sure that the same can be said of Rupert Murdoch’s insidious infotainment channel.
Fox News is like The Bad News Bears, if The Bad News Bears was not a feel-good story about a ragtag bunch of misfit kids who Walter Matthau molds into a winning baseball team, but rather a 24/7 cable network that spews hateful, racist, anti-Semitic, seditious, pro-Kremlin, anti-American horseshit into the discourse, while mendaciously insisting it is actual “fair and balanced” news.
And the owner admitted it, under oath. In his deposition for the Dominion lawsuit, Murdoch conceded that his “news” hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and Lou Dobbs “endorsed” Trump’s false narrative about election fraud. He was well aware of this but allowed it to happen.
Taken as a whole, the Dominion filings remove all doubt that Fox News, with the blessing of its odious owner, was all-in on Trump’s election lie, and was willing to gaslight its viewers to both appease the FPOTUS and help its bottom line. When asked why he permitted conspiracy theorist and insurrectionist Mike Lindell to appear on Tucker Carlson’s primetime program, Murdoch said: “It is not red or blue, it is green.” Money is more important to that nonagenarian ghoul than truth, democracy, or integrity.
Tucker Carlson is arguably the most dangerous propagandist at Fox News. He hosts the country’s top-rated news show, in primetime, and contributes additional programming as well. No one at the network is more bullish on Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, more skeptical of vaccines and masks and public health measures, more pro-Russia in the war in Ukraine, more damaging to the LGBT community, more in lockstep with the radical right—and more careful about disclosing his own personal conflicts of interest. Since the insurrection, he has only gotten worse: his face redder, his tone angrier, his laugh more maniacal, his segments more outrageous. On today’s PREVAIL podcast, Kat Abughazaleh, who monitors primetime Fox News for Media Matters For America, calls this “the real-time Jokerfication of Tucker Carlson.”
“But it’s all fake,” Abughazaleh tells me. “The laugh of his is fake, the way he makes jokes is fake, the way he expresses emotion is fake. I don’t know anything real about Tucker Carlson.” He lacks even a scintilla of authenticity. “I don’t get why you would buy into Tucker Carlson. Nothing about him is genuine.”
Of late, Carlson has “taken on this pro-smoking stance, and he’s started talking about the green M&M more, and stuff like that, and I think it’s because he realized, he’s kind of played all the cards he can for the moment,” Abughazaleh says. “Once you hit ‘race war’ on the largest cable news channel in the country, it’s kind of hard to go farther than that before hitting, like, Holocaust denial. . . . And no one cares anymore. When he talks about pro-smoking, they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s just Tucker being an idiot.’ No one really cares as much anymore because he’s already hit the ‘race war’ ceiling. He’s already hit the ‘call bomb threats into children’s hospitals’ ceiling.”
In short, Carlson’s outrageousness meter is already cranked up to 11. It can’t get louder without blowing a fuse. “It’s not really about Tucker anymore. It’s about the people he inspires.”
And that is where the real problem lies. Carlson inspires a lot of awful people. He’s a key player in the radicalization of conservative Americans. Because Fox News is treated as a legitimate news outfit by the White House, the military, and so on, it can hide its hateful agenda under a patina of credibility. Tucker may not be as noxious as Alex Jones, but he has a much larger, more mainstream audience. And in spirit, he is closer to Jones than he is to, say, Walter Cronkite. He is the (big) mouth of the radicalization funnel, the shallow strand of a dark and fetid ocean of disinformation, where some viewers drown in the riptides. Regular people watch his show and walk away believing cigarettes are fine, masks are bullshit, Putin is just peachy, and Trump’s election claims are valid—and they look elsewhere to learn more. Because of Tucker Carlson, the country is more divided, less willing to work together, and more vulnerable to attack from both hostile foreign intelligence services and homegrown fascists.
A dope like Sean Hannity might plausibly argue that he doesn’t know better. It’s hard to believe that Carlson, no dummy, is not well aware of what he’s doing, well aware of the harm he’s causing. How to rationalize being one of the nation’s most important tools to promote fascism and destroy democracy?
As Abughazaleh says, “The inside of his head must be a terrifying place to live.”
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S5 E3: The Jokerfication of Tucker Carlson (with Kat Abughazaleh)
Kat Abughazaleh’s job at Media Matters For America, as she puts it in her Twitter bio, is to watch Tucker Carlson so we don’t have to. Greg Olear talks to her about MMFA’s mission, how she found herself watching many hours of primetime Fox News, what makes good content for the network, how Fox News coverage has changed since J6, all things Tucker Carlson, and Mike Huckabee’s Christofascist children’s books. Plus: a new song about a bad guy.
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Photo credit: Greg Olear. The Fox News building in Midtown Manhattan, January 2023.
I know I thought of Alex Jones immediately before I even got to the part where Kat mentioned it. I cannot bear to even accidentally turn the channel to faux news. It is disgusting and Tucker makes me cringe.
I didn't understand why Rupert did not mention Carlson when he did Hannity and those other women. I wondered if he was sparing tucker from under the bus, but I kind of heard that Tucker was indeed mentioned elsewhere.
“Inside Tucker Carlson’s head”.....now that’s going to be cramped. Sort of like a medieval oubliette.