Jason Zengerle has published a New York Times op-ed under the headline “The Strange Afterlife of Tucker Carlson.” It tells us some things worth knowing about Carlson’s popularity (“Mr. Carlson’s podcast now regularly sits in the top five of Spotify’s weekly podcast rankings and occasionally even beats ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ for the top spot”) and about Carlson’s access to Donald Trump (Zengerle reminds us that Carlson lobbied for J.D. Vance when Trump was looking for a running mate, and probably made the sale by telling Trump that if he chose either of the other two men on his short list, ‘neocons” Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum, “U.S. intelligence agencies would try to assassinate him”).
However, Zengerle also writes this:
The people who are still paying attention to Mr. Carlson are getting an even more extreme version of him than the one they saw on Fox News. No longer subject to the guardrails of a publicly traded media company or even nominal corporate supervision, Mr. Carlson has further descended into the fever swamps. He’s described Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky as “ratlike” and a “persecutor of Christians,” accused Harvard of advocating “white genocide” and alleged that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and former Attorney General Bill Barr covered it up.
This paragraph sanewashes Fox News.
I’ve been telling you for more than twenty years that the mainstream media pays far too little attention to the inflammatory messages in the right-wing media. Three decades ago, mainstream news outlets weren’t monitoring Rush Limbaugh and other radio talkers. Later, they chose not to report regularly on what Fox News hosts were saying, leaving that to progressive monitoring organizations like Media Matters and Think Progress. As a result, mainstream journalists had no idea where rank-and-file GOP voters were getting their increasingly extreme ideas. Mainstream news organizations sent a lot of reporters into a lot of diners after the 2016 election. Those reporters could have just watched a little Fox every week or read some stories (or transcripts of prime-time hosts’ monologues) at FoxNews.com.
Does Zengerle really believe that Carlson was restrained when he was at Fox? Carlson may not have called Zelensky “ratlike” when he was at Fox, but in December 2022 he complained that Zelensky “arrived at the White House dressed like the manager of a strip club.” As for calling Zelensky “a persecutor of Christians,” in December 2022 Fox posted a video of a Carlson monologue with the headline “Tucker Carlson: Zelenskyy’s Cabinet Is Devising Ways to Punish Christians.”
(Carlson’s claim, as the fact checkers say, needs context. At about 3:15 in the video, Carlson says that Zelensky’s “Cabinet is now devising ways to punish Christians for practicing their banned ancient religion in Ukraine.” In fact, Zelensky has been at odds with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Last month, he signed a bill banning the church in his country, citing its ties to Russia, which the church insists it has cut. The church has seen its membership decline sharply in Ukraine since the Russian invasion — but that has been accompanied by a membership increase in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which has no Russia ties. That Christian church is not being persecuted.)
Last year on his podcast, Carlson did say that pro-Israel donors to Ivy League schools had previously funded what his interviewee, Candace Owens, called “anti-white explicit racism”; Carlson said the schools “were calling for white genocide.” Carlson may not have said exactly this while he was at Fox, but he came close, as Vanity Fair noted in 2021:
“In schools they are teaching this. Race hate,” seethed Tucker Carlson on February 19 while bemoaning a school program calling for “white allies” to “acknowledge the reality of racism.” By April, Carlson had moved on to parroting a white nationalist conspiracy theory, warning his audience that the Democratic Party is carrying out a massive racial “replacement” plot to swap America’s majority-white electorate with “more obedient voters from the third world.”
On Thursday night, Carlson took his racial paranoia to its inevitable end point by predicting that America is heading for an all-out race war. After mockingly decrying criticism against “white rage”—a reference to General Mark Milley’s thoughtful congressional testimony that has been derided by the right—Carlson then invoked the Rwandan genocide by asking his viewers, “The question is, and this is the question that we should be meditating on day in and day out, is how do we get out of this vortex, this cycle, before it’s too late? How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?” Given that Carlson discussing was flanked by an onscreen graphic that read “ANTI-WHITE MANIA” during the segment, his choice reference to the East African genocide—which led to the deaths of as many as 800,000 people, mostly of a minority ethnic group—was clearly an implied way of warning his audience that the teaching about systemic racism could result in a similar slaughter of white Americans.
And while Carlson may not have directly “alleged that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and former Attorney General Bill Barr covered it up,” here’s a still from a 2019 Carlson interview with Louisiana senator John Kennedy after Kennedy expressed suspicion about Epstein’s death:
Here’s the interview.
Note that it’s prefaced by a clip of Senator Kennedy saying the following to fellow senators, in that insipid faux-folksy manner of his:
SENATOR KENNEDY: Christmas ornaments, drywall, and Jerry [sic] Epstein: Name three things that don’t hang themselves.
Tucker Carlson is maybe a millimeter to the right of where he was on Fox News. But most mainstream journalists have no real idea what he used to say on Fox — or what any other current or former Fox host says. They and their editors have chosen not to report on the messages coming from some of the most influential media outlets in America — with rare exceptions, like this elaborate 2022 New York Times piece on Carlson, which was very good, but was clearly seen at the Times as a “one and done” report, after which they could go right back to ignoring the content of Fox broadcasts. You can’t understand what’s happened to the Republican Party in America without knowing what’s in GOP voters’ media diet. But most mainstream outlets don’t care to find out.
(Editor’s Note: Crooks and Liars was one of the first monitoring Fox “news” as well. Our founder John Amato regularly recorded Bill-O when he would lie on his radio show to callers about what he said on his television show, and was one of the first out there posting video on this new thing called a “blog” to dispute O’Reilly’s lies.)
Posted with permission from No More Mr. Nice Blog
