I don’t know if Tucker Carlson is an actual homophobe, xenophobe, and racist, or if he just plays one on TV. There have been several iterations of Tucker through the years. Prior to landing at Fox News, he hosted shows on both CNN and MSNBC, and let’s not forget his legendary turn on Dancing with the Stars.
What has become increasingly clear is that Mr. Carlson’s relationship with truth is tenuous at best.
I think most of us would agree that there is a difference between fact and opinion. On most other networks, opinion is typically undergirded by fact. For example, there was a bloody riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. We know that this is factual because anyone who doesn’t live under a rock has seen the footage of the riot over and over again, and the legislators working there that day—on both sides of the aisle—have confirmed it.
How a commentator talks about that event—whether it was a justifiable expression of MAGA outrage or an attempt by brainwashed, paramilitary crazies to subvert democracy—falls into the area of opinion. Clearly, Fox News has a particular editorial slant, and that’s fine. However, when opinion is founded on deliberate lies spread by the same talking heads who are offering their opinion, we don’t just edge closer to the danger zone, we cross the line and set up camp there. That sort of news “analysis” pushes us closer to the exact forms of propaganda employed by totalitarians to prevent the public from having access to actual information. Any dictatorship exerting state control of the media works from the same playbook. Think Russia; think North Korea; think China; think Nazi Germany. The deliberate deployment of misinformation is one of the cornerstones of fascism.
I don’t know whether Mr. Carlson is just so cynical and self-serving that he deliberately fed his viewers a bucket of hooey every night in order to solidify his position as a Fox rainmaker and maintain his personal wealth, or whether he actually believed the garbage he spewed, but I suspect he knew that he was lying.
In fact, I don’t suspect it—I know it.
If you only consume your news via Fox (or its propagandic analogues Newsmax and OAN), you may have never been exposed to actual, ethical, fact-based journalism, and therefore never have been exposed to truth. Tucker Carlson, one of the primary purveyors of the “big lie” of a stolen election, knew that he was lying even as the words were flying out of his mouth. Text messages between him and the other Pinocchio’s at Fox reveal that they all knew the election was free and fair, not stolen. They talked about it frequently between themselves, and they acknowledged, when they thought no one was looking, that they were continuing to deliberately air misinformation in order to maintain their viewership and, by extension, their bloated salaries. Carlson also shared with his colleagues that he loathed Donald Trump, and compared him to Satan.
If you do not consume any other form of “news,” you probably are not aware of that either, since the last place you are going to hear about the lie machine that is Fox News is on … Fox News. They have been sued by Smartmatic and Dominion voting machine companies because they refused to stop lying, in spite of hundreds of requests from those companies to cease and desist. The texts between the Fox anchors, now public and accessible and provided to readers of The Edge by Mickey Friedman in his very thorough review on March 21, proved the case.
Because the evidence of Fox’s intentional malfeasance is abundant and irrefutable, the profoundly unethical media mogul Rupert Murdoch has now decided to settle the Dominion case by paying them close to $800 million—all the better to avoid a granular disclosure of his network’s incessant airing of grotesque falsehoods. The next reckoning will be with Smartmatic, which seeks close to $3 billion in their separate defamation lawsuit. A third lawsuit, brought by a former Fox producer, will also be decided in due course.
One of the casualties of the Dominion case is Tucker Carlson, who was dismissed from his position last week. I suspect that he has generated enough wealth as Fox’s former Liar-in-Chief that he’ll never need to work again, which is a good thing, since he is unlikely to be offered employment at almost any other news organization. Perhaps Steve Bannon of “War Room,” or Alex Jones of “Infowars” would be willing to take him. He’d fit right in.
I would like to encourage those of you who turn to Fox News and its brethren as your sole sources of information to acquaint yourselves with the facts before you turn on the TV. Read one newspaper a day in which reporting is thoroughly vetted and pruned of misinformation. You will know that it is an ethical newspaper by locating the page on which retractions and corrections are printed. A responsible news organization actually tells you when they’ve gotten it wrong.
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe will provide you with fact-based national and international information. The “Opinion” pieces in those papers are clearly marked and placed in their own sections, so that no reader is misled. The same is true of The Berkshire Edge. Read the news first and opinions second, so that you are familiar with the facts upon which the opinions are based.
I occasionally watch Fox News, in brief intervals, depending on whether or not my stomach feels strong enough. I also watch CNN; PBS; ABC; CBS; and, yes, MSNBC as well. Because I read high-quality newspapers every day, I know whether an opinion ventured by a talking head is conditioned on actual fact, or whether it amounts to a deliberate distortion of reality intended to mislead viewers.
Don’t be afraid to try that approach. No one ever died from being exposed to the truth. I am confident you’ll survive.
