Good piece. I particularly like "Tucker is like an algorithm, doing a brute-force grid search over the space of things that it’s possible to get people mad about, optimizing for attention and money." Yeah, he is a one-man Twitter.
The whole thing reminds me of Father Coughlin from the 1930s. At one point one-third of America listened to his weekly radio programs, which espoused antisemitism and support for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Eventually he was forced off the air in October 1939 but it wasn't like American antisemitism disappeared because he was gone.
Rachel Maddow did a nice history piece on Tucker’s predecessors. We animal/humans are hard wired for attending to danger so the Tuckers of the world exploit this every day. Noah is saying this s**t ain’t stop pin’ and I agree.
Not really. There are more lefts than rights in the U.S., so if she were the Tucker of the Left, she'd be winning the ratings war and MSNBC would be the No. 1 cable network, not Fox News.
The lefts are probably watching pro wrestling, sports or scripted shows.
The Rachel Maddows of the world do the same thing though. Tucker screams about "replacement theory", Maddow was a cheerleader for the "Russia collusion" myth.
Noah, you're smart enough to know full well that the Ukraine narrative isn't at all black and white, and Yuri's points about lies in Afghanistan and Iraq are completely germane. All the same people are running this show as were running those -- why would we expect them to be truthful this time? The military industrial complex is a real thing, and it's making loads of money off Ukraine -- war is the only business where you make things with the goal of destroying them so you have to make more. That doesn't mean supporting Ukraine is a bad idea, but insinuating that anyone who has reservations about hundreds of billions of US taxpayers dollars being syphoned into the Eastern European swamp of corruption that is Ukraine is "supporting the bad guys" is beneath you.
Bush's claim that you're "either with us or against us" was wrong -- the world isn't black and white. Yours today that "Yuri is supporting the bad guys" is equally wrong To quote Obi Wan: "only a Sith speaks in moral absolutes." (Yeah, I worked hard to get a Star Wars reference into this.) :-)
Idk anything about Yuri, but in debates about US wars it seems really important not to assume opposition to war is motivated by enemy allegiance, even if it sure looks that way to the pro-war side. (Which I count myself on, in this case.)
To start with, they’re lying about who blew up the NordStream pipeline and the recent leaks indicate they’re lying about NATO’s level of direct involvement in the conflict. I’d argue the MIC and legacy media are also lying by omission when it comes to the likelihood of Ukraine recapturing all of their territory.
I personally hope the Ukrainians miraculously repel the Russians and restore the status quo ante. All of the lies listed above may be noble lies in service of that unlikely outcome. But they’re still lies.
Seriously, do you really think Tucker or any other "anti-war" journalists other than Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald would be anti-war if their preferred party were in power and prosecuting a war. For example, what were their respective views on the 2003 Iraq war?
Being anti-war for these guys is just a way to oppose the party they don't like.
Actually, yes. Tucker has been very public that the gradual implosion of the Iraq narrative had a huge effect on his views. He realized he had been putting too much faith in the goodwill of the military and bureaucracy of his own country.
He's not the only one. I can really relate to that, since realizing the level of lies that drove us into Iraq and the level of lies that kept us in Afghanistan altered my thinking in the same way.
I supported Iraq. I think we need a different strategy in Ukraine, in large part because I don't trust the people who screwed up those theatres to open up another one.
I didn't mean to imply they were Republicans and I don't see anything in my comment that would imply this. I specifically stated that among the anti-war people, they're the only ones who have been consistently anti-war.
Calling Tucker Carlson "Anti-War" is almost as laughable as calling him a "journalist."
"If our leaders cared about the United States, protecting American citizens, they would do everything in their power to take the border back from Mexican drug cartels," Tucker Carlson said.
Carlson is just in favor of different types of wars.
Yup - after all the bullshit about Trump being so racist and AOC performatively sobbing at a detention center, Biden is now adopting identical policies.
Yes this is pretty similar to a long tradition of the Republican party being Euro-skeptic and fine with taking Cuba, the Philippines, and so on. Right before WW2, virtually no one but cranks like Du Bois opposed war with Japan. By contrast, the European front was far more controversial, with the recent immigrant and export industrial Midwest most fiercely opposed to allying with the British (many Irish and German Americans had a low opinion of the British Empire.) "Anti-war" is similar to "isolationist", in that it is used often but just as often doesn't accurately describe the worldview at hand.
But the point of the article we're responding to is that Tucker wasn't really "anti-war" in the sense that he gave a single shit about whether America supported Ukraine against Russia or not. He was an outrage generating machine that happened to be spreading the outrage in a direction you agreed with on this single issue, but he wasn't invested in making a careful, coherent case for the anti-war cause. He wasn't trying to convince anyone. He just wanted to get people mad so that his ratings would stay high.
Do you think Tucker was actually helpful to your cause? Was he doing anything useful to make the general population turn against supporting Ukraine? I'd say he wasn't, because he was a piece of obvious shit on so many topics that even if you think he was right about Ukraine he tarred your cause by association. You're better off without that "prominent voice" and he definitely wasn't an "anti war journalist".
Matthew, did you ever really watch Tucker? He made careful coherent cases all the time. Not always, sometimes he just ranted. But on many issues: Arab spring, Syria, COVID lab leak, BLM grift, men competing in women's sports... he has been way ahead of the curve.
Ukraine is rapidly looking that way too. The "interagency consensus" (otherwise known as the blob" is starting to shift away from "let's retake Crimea" toward "we need a negotiated settlement". This is exactly the direction Tucker has been advocating for a while now, and for which he's been making the case for over a year.
If being anti-war means letting Russia roll over any number of its neighbors then I don't want to be anti-war. This is just a nonsense position. Invading a dictatorship is not comparable to helping a democracy resist invasion.
You are fooling yourself if you think Carlson's "anti-war journalism", specifically as it relates to Russia and Ukraine, is anything other than an affinity for the brand of white ethno nationalism espoused by Putin.
I think this is the most insightful commentary I’ve read on Tucker Carlson’s firing.
The best way to look at him really is as an entrepreneur working hard to create a product that sells. And he doesn’t particularly care what that product is since the only thing that matters is giving consumers / viewers what they want.
And that’s the really sad part. He’s selling outrage because that what sells. And despite what some seem to hope, his firing won’t make Fox or the media landscape any better. He’ll just be replaced by someone else who will likely be even better at keeping the rage machine going.
And that’s ultimately why he got the boot. His biggest transgression was forgetting he was just another employee in Murdock’s empire. And despite the ratings. replaceable.
I suspect he got the boot because he wasn't profitable. Fox couldn't sell advertising on the highest rated news or commentary show in all of media, because the class of elites who make large corporate advertising decisions detested him. A lot of Tucker's viewers would likely drink Bud Light, but you can be sure that Bud's VP of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid (the architect of Bud's partnership with "man in makeup" Dylan Mulvaney) would never even have considered advertising on Tucker's show. The rest of the Fortune 500 is similar -- even if they privately agree with Tucker, none of them will defect because their social circle would ostracize them.
That's not really a dig on Tucker; it's a dig on how disconnected our elites are from most Americans. And that's a serious problem for any republic, whether you like Tucker or not.
I think you're right, William, at least that's the goal. Anheuser Bush has decided that it would rather spout obvious lies (like "Mulvaney is a woman") in order to attract a younger demographic. I do think you're ignoring the social element though, which is very real.
There was a time when elites believed that they had greater responsibilities -- to morality, to country, to God, to truth -- than us plebs. "Noblesse oblige" was far from perfect, but there were social consequences if elites did not at least pretend to uphold it. A 18th century English noble or wealthy American merchant refusing his responsibilities under this system would be shunned. Today's elites face similar shunning, but the standards they are required to uphold antithesize noblesse oblige. The basic cost of entry into "polite society" today is lies: absolute moral standards are hateful, America was founded to uphold racism, anyone who believes in God is a rube, truth is individually specific.
If we allow these ideas to become the fixed shibboleths of Western elites, I don't think there's any saving us. All of them are false and make for an extremely unrealistic model of reality, and false views of reality tend to produce poor outcomes. Reality has a habit of biting back -- ask the communists about how that feels.
To me, that's why "go woke, go broke" is so important to upload. It's the best tool I have to defend reality. In this case, AB managed to so offend their existing customer base that it may even work.
Jon Stewart's critique of Crossfire was complete horseshit (as is yours, sorry), and we are now living in the world that demonstrates exactly why. I believe that Crossfire is deeply missed in American life today. The hosts came together as friends and Americans to argue about politics over imaginary beers. And it was clear by the end that they *were* friends, that they might go get a beer when they were done. It was theater, sure, but it was important theater - it illustrated how you should argue politics with your friends and family who disagreed with you.
Now, everyone on TV debates strawmen, and as a result the Americans who consume the most news are the least accurate at describing the political views of the other side. People are disowning family and friends for supporting the wrong candidate. I haven't had a fun political argument with a friend or family member in almost 15 years now. Bring back Crossfire.
It saddens me to say, because I loved him at the time, but John Stewart was just as responsible for this age of bad feelings as Tucker was. His show was like a google alert set for “white trash the audience can feel superior to.”
Crossfire wasn't as bad as Stewart thought, but that show won't bring back a mainstream culture with social mores that held in the middle and radiated outward, which existed in the 1990s and is pretty fractured today. A cranky Trad on Twitter bemoaning the rise of LGBT rights for everything is clearly wrong, and yet they are probably closer to the mark of what changed than blaming Jon Stewart and the end of one particular TV show on CNN.
Another example of wrong but closer would be Glenn Greenwald. He's obsessed with the social standing of national security people in American mass culture, to the point he ignores what other things Tucker says that would give any progressive a patently obvious reason to strongly disagree. But "America's War on Terror was one last mainstream push across media and parties for a cause before totally falling apart" is closer to the mark of how we divided our society and not just our politics, than the end of Crossfire.
At least on Bill Maher's "Real Time," everyone dropped all the pretense of civility and decency and got to use profanity and turn debates into verbal food fights.
> He pushed antivax disinformation so strongly that his own Fox News coworkers had to step in and complain
I read both articles. I couldn't find misinformation anywhere in Carlson's monologue and I followed everything related to the COVID vaccines unusually closely. The CNN story in contrast, says:
> The 15-minute monologue began with an on-screen banner that said “EVERYONE IN AUTHORITY WANTS YOU TO GET YOUR VACCINE,” and it went downhill from there
Implying that the banner was somehow incorrect. That is absurd. How can anyone say it "went downhill from there". Who exactly was in authority and did not want you get your vaccine? Nobody, the powers that be were entirely united in that quest and went to extreme lengths to force people to take the shots over and over.
The CNN article goes on to embarrass itself further. Apparently they're salty that "Carlson routinely and cynically argues that sources like the CDC and CNN cannot be trusted", lol. The rest of the article is quoting random people who had appeared on Fox at some point, most of whom go on to commit logical fallacies of various kinds.
I'm not in the US, don't receive Fox and never watch Tucker Carlson. Everything I know about this man I've read second hand from material at the edges of the US culture war, but if these two articles are representative then no wonder the man has huge audiences. The clarity of thought and accuracy in his monologue is light years beyond anything in the CNN article.
Agreed. When Tucker talked about the lab leak theory 3 years ago, it was racist and hateful and a completely false conspiracy theory. Turns out he was just way ahead of the curve.
If that was the only time, you could say "a stopped clock is right twice a day", but it's not. There are many other similar examples, and it appears Ukraine is in the process of becoming another one, as the foreign policy blob has already started walking back the "regime change in Russia" push.
Sean Hannity is another gem. When he broadcast denials that water-boarding wasn’t torture, Christopher Hutchins, who supported the Iraq War, issued a challenge and bet. Both agreed to meet and be water-boarded and the money wagered would go to charity. Hitches showed up. Hannity was a no-show. Hitches went ahead and subjected himself to water-boarding. Hannity and Carlson are cowards.
Tucker may be opportunistic in the positions he is currently advocating. But the idea that until Trump he was a standard Republican is false.
Carlson has always been a bit of a heterodox right-winger.
In 199 he reported, with disgust, George Bush's support for execution of Karla Faye Tucker. Probably as Tucker himself is vehemently anti-death penalty. And repeatedly stated during Bush admin that he disliked the president.
In 2004 he renounced his own support for the Iraq War well before many liberals came around to that position.
Under Carlson, The Daily Wire was a center-right publication but didn't take the standard right-wing lines all the time. They hired people like Mickey Kaus for them.
Wasn’t the point of the article that Tucker moved from political discussion to generating anger as a way to increase his reach and popularity? What he was in the past and that difference now is exactly the point, no?
I regard the Tucker is "generating anger" accusation as just a dismissive rhetorical device.
Don't MSM newspapers create outrage by overplaying the number of black men killed by police, school shootings, etc?
If you don't like people emphasizing a particular news story or point of view, they're ginning up outrage. But for those you agree with it, they're just doing journalism.
Glad to see him go, but I’ve always had a hard time with the conventional wisdom that people like him are purely cynical and just exploiting bad feelings for the sake of ratings. I mean, they’re certainly doing that to some degree, but part of me has always thought that deep down they really do feel a lot of the resentment they’re peddling. Maybe it’s because I’ve personally known so many “conservative uncles” in real life who sincerely feel and express that seething anger towards all things coded as “left” or “woke” or “progressive.” Even when Carlson was knowingly distorting the truth, I always got the sense that the hate in his heart was very genuine. Maybe it all started when Jon Stewart humiliated him, maybe before. I just think it’s too easy to write people like that off as cynically selling snake oil to suckers. I think maybe, in a way, that’s easier for liberal-minded people like myself to accept, because how could anyone really feel so much anger towards so many innocuous things? And yet they do.
There are variations on cynical though. He might not believe exactly what he's saying but he might believe that *someone* needs to say it (perhaps in an ends-justify-the-means way) and if someone is going to make money saying it, why not him?
By way of analogy, lawyers are sometimes forced to take public positions they privately disagree with but justify because "everyone deserves their day in court" and what not.
As a Cynic, I like to point out a fascinating quirk of history. Cynical as we understand it, is a synonym for personalities such as amoral, self-dealing and manipulative. In classical Greece, the Cynics were the philosophical school who denounced amorality, self-dealing and manipulativeness and sought to break this pattern of the human condition and find a way for humans to live authentically and sincerely. They somehow became associated with advocating for the behaviors they stood against.
It’s in his psychological history just like Trump’s assholic behavior and my sometimes being a curmudgeon is. He probably is doing battle w ghosts. I know who/what my ghosts are and I STILL act out sometimes.
Why do you think the alteration of Tucker's views on the show were faked? People change over their lives (thank God). I started as a communist, then became a libertarian (in order to be a better communist -- read Marx if you don't know why) before adapting to a Burkean conservative. Countries face different problems at different times; only someone blindly committed to an ideology refuses to change his mind given changing circumstances.
"You tuned in to enrage yourself "
Maybe most Tucker viewers were just trying to enrage themselves (I know a couple who might fall into that category) but I tuned in for the same reason I listened to Rush Limbaugh's monologue: to hear about events that would simply not be covered anywhere else. (And besides: Rush was was funny even if you didn't always agree with him.)
Fooled? I couldn't care less if he comes by his opinions honestly. I disagree with him on just about everything else; but now there is not a single pundit on TV who opposes our never ending stupid wars that we ALWAYS have endless money for. And his criticism of Biden for arresting black socialists for being anti war. We have no national interest in Ukraine. You can think whatever you want about Putin, but if you think, after this, he is somehow going to pose any threat to the rest of Europe much less the US you are not a rational person capable of acting on anything but emotions. Clearly there is a market for anti-war views, what does it say about our supposedly free press that there is literally no one on TV news, no one at NYT, WaPo, Vox, Slate ect who has even the mildest criticism of our stupid endless wars?
Rules based national order? tell that to Kosovo.
Unprovoked war? Tell that to Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Everywhere we get involved we make things exponentially worse for everyone. We are not a stabilizing force on the world stage.
Hillary the Hawk killed them. Or at least made it entirely clear they were not welcome in her party. She and her surrogates insisted at every turn that the only reason anyone didn't support her was because they were racist and sexist (just like she did in 2008). And then when she still didn't win her campaign released the Steele dossier, which her campaign illegally paid for, to blame it all on Putin.
And since neither the news nor the party are willing to admit fault, anyone on the left who so much as suggests that who controls the donbas isn't worth nuclear holocaust gets immediately shouted down as a Putin puppet, kremlin apologist, who loves Trump.
Rod Dreher (who knows Tucker personally) has confirmed this story. "The most popular news-talk television host on the air, was removed from his job because he gave a talk about good and evil that offended the amoral billionaire who runs the show." (from Rod's paywalled article on this subject)
If you haven't watched the Heritage Foundation speech the article references, you should: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebG2POkoHgU You may disagree, but it will help you understand how hungry Americans are to believe in something beyond themselves.
U.S. population 330 million. So, being generous, Carlson’s audience is 3 million. Wow, that’s 0.009%. Thankfully, Americans have something better to do than consume mainstream media.
A cursory look at mainstream media outlets, be it TV or newspapers, show the numbers aren’t much better. The mainstream media is anything but Main Street. The atomization of media is a plus. No longer are a handful of gatekeepers shifting what information is made available to the public. The mainstream media is a giant Skinner’s box, full of influencers trying to influence other influencers. Twitter, mainstream media’s assignment desk, is a good metaphor for most of media.
As for Carlson: who could forget when he was confronted by an outfitter in a Montana fishing shop. In a hushed tone, he pleaded with the outfitter not to have his daughter hear the verbal criticism. Unlike some of Carlson’s viewers, the outfitter didn’t threaten or assault Carlson but criticized his character. And Carlson immediately wanted to hide behind his daughter’s skirts. One wonders, how many other daughters have heard Carlson’s broadcast bile?
If Twitter is the assignment desk, Google is the AI managing editor. SEO determines not only what gets read, but it also informs the hiring and resource allocation decisions of what gets covered and who gets to cover it.
There's a second-order effect on what we see. SEO culture also creates a digital region, like the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt, called the Media Belt.
In the Media Belt, there are four gatekeepers: New York City, Washington, L.A. and the Bay Area. Stories with datelines from these cities; topics of finance, politics, entertainment and tech; and most of the consumers of said content live in these four metros -- all of these are reasons why SEO is dominated by finance/politics/entertainment/tech, because both the newsmakers and consumers of the content skew search results.
It's a big part of why local news is dying. If you live outside of these four metros, there's a 60% chance your newspaper is owned by a hedge fund (GateHouse/Gannett, Alden and McClatchy control some of the biggest chains). Your TV and radio stations are owned by non-network owned/operated conglomerates and your management and presentation decisions come to your market like Ikea furniture.
While I am no fan of TC, I was impressed with the balance Noah has shown in getting below the surface on why a phenom like Tucker exists at all. For me the hard question remains: has media (TV, social, podcasts, blogs posts) hijacked our ability to reason for ourselves, replacing thoughtful consideration with emotion-raking clickbait tidbits and is there even a way back, if we acknowledge it? Warhol's 15-minutes of fame idea has been surpassed to become 15 seconds or even nanoseconds of fame -- whatever we can get. Great article, Noah.
Good article but one minor quibble. Brute force grid searches are extremely inefficient. Tucker is too smart for that. Probably better described as a type of importance-sampling search.
Good piece. I particularly like "Tucker is like an algorithm, doing a brute-force grid search over the space of things that it’s possible to get people mad about, optimizing for attention and money." Yeah, he is a one-man Twitter.
The whole thing reminds me of Father Coughlin from the 1930s. At one point one-third of America listened to his weekly radio programs, which espoused antisemitism and support for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Eventually he was forced off the air in October 1939 but it wasn't like American antisemitism disappeared because he was gone.
That's a great analogy.
Rachel Maddow did a nice history piece on Tucker’s predecessors. We animal/humans are hard wired for attending to danger so the Tuckers of the world exploit this every day. Noah is saying this s**t ain’t stop pin’ and I agree.
Maddow is the Tucker of the Left, she should have just pointed at herself.
Not really. There are more lefts than rights in the U.S., so if she were the Tucker of the Left, she'd be winning the ratings war and MSNBC would be the No. 1 cable network, not Fox News.
The lefts are probably watching pro wrestling, sports or scripted shows.
What are you talking about? MSNBC is #2
pro wrestling...?
Yes, pro wrestling. There's a wrestling boom now like the late 1990s with two prominent national companies again.
They're doing well in the 18-49 demographic, but Fox is No. 1 overall. Cable trends old.
The Rachel Maddows of the world do the same thing though. Tucker screams about "replacement theory", Maddow was a cheerleader for the "Russia collusion" myth.
I didn't say it was an analogy so I have no idea what you're on about.
I also don't know what MIC is. You shouldn't use obscure acronyms.
What about Ukraine? I think we can all agree what happened and is happening. What lies?
I think "Yuri" here pretty obviously supports the bad guys in that particular conflict. 😉
Noah, you're smart enough to know full well that the Ukraine narrative isn't at all black and white, and Yuri's points about lies in Afghanistan and Iraq are completely germane. All the same people are running this show as were running those -- why would we expect them to be truthful this time? The military industrial complex is a real thing, and it's making loads of money off Ukraine -- war is the only business where you make things with the goal of destroying them so you have to make more. That doesn't mean supporting Ukraine is a bad idea, but insinuating that anyone who has reservations about hundreds of billions of US taxpayers dollars being syphoned into the Eastern European swamp of corruption that is Ukraine is "supporting the bad guys" is beneath you.
Bush's claim that you're "either with us or against us" was wrong -- the world isn't black and white. Yours today that "Yuri is supporting the bad guys" is equally wrong To quote Obi Wan: "only a Sith speaks in moral absolutes." (Yeah, I worked hard to get a Star Wars reference into this.) :-)
Idk anything about Yuri, but in debates about US wars it seems really important not to assume opposition to war is motivated by enemy allegiance, even if it sure looks that way to the pro-war side. (Which I count myself on, in this case.)
To start with, they’re lying about who blew up the NordStream pipeline and the recent leaks indicate they’re lying about NATO’s level of direct involvement in the conflict. I’d argue the MIC and legacy media are also lying by omission when it comes to the likelihood of Ukraine recapturing all of their territory.
I personally hope the Ukrainians miraculously repel the Russians and restore the status quo ante. All of the lies listed above may be noble lies in service of that unlikely outcome. But they’re still lies.
No and no
What are you expecting to find out.
Seriously, do you really think Tucker or any other "anti-war" journalists other than Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald would be anti-war if their preferred party were in power and prosecuting a war. For example, what were their respective views on the 2003 Iraq war?
Being anti-war for these guys is just a way to oppose the party they don't like.
Tucker Carlson *did* renounce his support for the Iraq War in 2004. Well before the liberal advocates of the war realized they were wrong.
Actually, yes. Tucker has been very public that the gradual implosion of the Iraq narrative had a huge effect on his views. He realized he had been putting too much faith in the goodwill of the military and bureaucracy of his own country.
He's not the only one. I can really relate to that, since realizing the level of lies that drove us into Iraq and the level of lies that kept us in Afghanistan altered my thinking in the same way.
I supported Iraq. I think we need a different strategy in Ukraine, in large part because I don't trust the people who screwed up those theatres to open up another one.
I didn't mean to imply they were Republicans and I don't see anything in my comment that would imply this. I specifically stated that among the anti-war people, they're the only ones who have been consistently anti-war.
Sorry, mis-read your comment! Ignored the "other than"
Calling Tucker Carlson "Anti-War" is almost as laughable as calling him a "journalist."
"If our leaders cared about the United States, protecting American citizens, they would do everything in their power to take the border back from Mexican drug cartels," Tucker Carlson said.
Carlson is just in favor of different types of wars.
There is a difference between a country securing its own borders vs. playing Team America: World Police.
Securing its borders is what Biden now doing. Google CBP One 11 May.
Yup - after all the bullshit about Trump being so racist and AOC performatively sobbing at a detention center, Biden is now adopting identical policies.
Yes this is pretty similar to a long tradition of the Republican party being Euro-skeptic and fine with taking Cuba, the Philippines, and so on. Right before WW2, virtually no one but cranks like Du Bois opposed war with Japan. By contrast, the European front was far more controversial, with the recent immigrant and export industrial Midwest most fiercely opposed to allying with the British (many Irish and German Americans had a low opinion of the British Empire.) "Anti-war" is similar to "isolationist", in that it is used often but just as often doesn't accurately describe the worldview at hand.
But the point of the article we're responding to is that Tucker wasn't really "anti-war" in the sense that he gave a single shit about whether America supported Ukraine against Russia or not. He was an outrage generating machine that happened to be spreading the outrage in a direction you agreed with on this single issue, but he wasn't invested in making a careful, coherent case for the anti-war cause. He wasn't trying to convince anyone. He just wanted to get people mad so that his ratings would stay high.
Do you think Tucker was actually helpful to your cause? Was he doing anything useful to make the general population turn against supporting Ukraine? I'd say he wasn't, because he was a piece of obvious shit on so many topics that even if you think he was right about Ukraine he tarred your cause by association. You're better off without that "prominent voice" and he definitely wasn't an "anti war journalist".
Matthew, did you ever really watch Tucker? He made careful coherent cases all the time. Not always, sometimes he just ranted. But on many issues: Arab spring, Syria, COVID lab leak, BLM grift, men competing in women's sports... he has been way ahead of the curve.
Ukraine is rapidly looking that way too. The "interagency consensus" (otherwise known as the blob" is starting to shift away from "let's retake Crimea" toward "we need a negotiated settlement". This is exactly the direction Tucker has been advocating for a while now, and for which he's been making the case for over a year.
Father Coughlin was also an anti-war propagandist. He was opposed to the United States fighting against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Exactly. The fish can’t see the water they swim in.
If being anti-war means letting Russia roll over any number of its neighbors then I don't want to be anti-war. This is just a nonsense position. Invading a dictatorship is not comparable to helping a democracy resist invasion.
You are fooling yourself if you think Carlson's "anti-war journalism", specifically as it relates to Russia and Ukraine, is anything other than an affinity for the brand of white ethno nationalism espoused by Putin.
You don't think isolationism is a thing?
Love Putin? Tell him not to invade other countries.
Lol
I think this is the most insightful commentary I’ve read on Tucker Carlson’s firing.
The best way to look at him really is as an entrepreneur working hard to create a product that sells. And he doesn’t particularly care what that product is since the only thing that matters is giving consumers / viewers what they want.
And that’s the really sad part. He’s selling outrage because that what sells. And despite what some seem to hope, his firing won’t make Fox or the media landscape any better. He’ll just be replaced by someone else who will likely be even better at keeping the rage machine going.
And that’s ultimately why he got the boot. His biggest transgression was forgetting he was just another employee in Murdock’s empire. And despite the ratings. replaceable.
I suspect he got the boot because he wasn't profitable. Fox couldn't sell advertising on the highest rated news or commentary show in all of media, because the class of elites who make large corporate advertising decisions detested him. A lot of Tucker's viewers would likely drink Bud Light, but you can be sure that Bud's VP of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid (the architect of Bud's partnership with "man in makeup" Dylan Mulvaney) would never even have considered advertising on Tucker's show. The rest of the Fortune 500 is similar -- even if they privately agree with Tucker, none of them will defect because their social circle would ostracize them.
That's not really a dig on Tucker; it's a dig on how disconnected our elites are from most Americans. And that's a serious problem for any republic, whether you like Tucker or not.
UPDATE: Apparently we're all wrong: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/tucker-carlson-fox-news-rupert-murdoch Tucker got the boot because he dared to speak about Christianity.
No, they wouldn't advertise on Tucker's show because if they did, everyone they were trying to capture with Mulvaney would boycott their product.
I think you're right, William, at least that's the goal. Anheuser Bush has decided that it would rather spout obvious lies (like "Mulvaney is a woman") in order to attract a younger demographic. I do think you're ignoring the social element though, which is very real.
There was a time when elites believed that they had greater responsibilities -- to morality, to country, to God, to truth -- than us plebs. "Noblesse oblige" was far from perfect, but there were social consequences if elites did not at least pretend to uphold it. A 18th century English noble or wealthy American merchant refusing his responsibilities under this system would be shunned. Today's elites face similar shunning, but the standards they are required to uphold antithesize noblesse oblige. The basic cost of entry into "polite society" today is lies: absolute moral standards are hateful, America was founded to uphold racism, anyone who believes in God is a rube, truth is individually specific.
If we allow these ideas to become the fixed shibboleths of Western elites, I don't think there's any saving us. All of them are false and make for an extremely unrealistic model of reality, and false views of reality tend to produce poor outcomes. Reality has a habit of biting back -- ask the communists about how that feels.
To me, that's why "go woke, go broke" is so important to upload. It's the best tool I have to defend reality. In this case, AB managed to so offend their existing customer base that it may even work.
Jon Stewart's critique of Crossfire was complete horseshit (as is yours, sorry), and we are now living in the world that demonstrates exactly why. I believe that Crossfire is deeply missed in American life today. The hosts came together as friends and Americans to argue about politics over imaginary beers. And it was clear by the end that they *were* friends, that they might go get a beer when they were done. It was theater, sure, but it was important theater - it illustrated how you should argue politics with your friends and family who disagreed with you.
Now, everyone on TV debates strawmen, and as a result the Americans who consume the most news are the least accurate at describing the political views of the other side. People are disowning family and friends for supporting the wrong candidate. I haven't had a fun political argument with a friend or family member in almost 15 years now. Bring back Crossfire.
It saddens me to say, because I loved him at the time, but John Stewart was just as responsible for this age of bad feelings as Tucker was. His show was like a google alert set for “white trash the audience can feel superior to.”
The disingenuousness about it didn't help either. Even in that clip he's not honest about the Daily Show's real place in the landscape
Totally agree. and Stewart's histrionic confrontation was just weird.
Crossfire wasn't as bad as Stewart thought, but that show won't bring back a mainstream culture with social mores that held in the middle and radiated outward, which existed in the 1990s and is pretty fractured today. A cranky Trad on Twitter bemoaning the rise of LGBT rights for everything is clearly wrong, and yet they are probably closer to the mark of what changed than blaming Jon Stewart and the end of one particular TV show on CNN.
Another example of wrong but closer would be Glenn Greenwald. He's obsessed with the social standing of national security people in American mass culture, to the point he ignores what other things Tucker says that would give any progressive a patently obvious reason to strongly disagree. But "America's War on Terror was one last mainstream push across media and parties for a cause before totally falling apart" is closer to the mark of how we divided our society and not just our politics, than the end of Crossfire.
Oh my. I agree with this so much.
They didn't cancel Crossfire, they incorporated people yelling at each other to score points into every single cable news show.
At least on Bill Maher's "Real Time," everyone dropped all the pretense of civility and decency and got to use profanity and turn debates into verbal food fights.
> He pushed antivax disinformation so strongly that his own Fox News coworkers had to step in and complain
I read both articles. I couldn't find misinformation anywhere in Carlson's monologue and I followed everything related to the COVID vaccines unusually closely. The CNN story in contrast, says:
> The 15-minute monologue began with an on-screen banner that said “EVERYONE IN AUTHORITY WANTS YOU TO GET YOUR VACCINE,” and it went downhill from there
Implying that the banner was somehow incorrect. That is absurd. How can anyone say it "went downhill from there". Who exactly was in authority and did not want you get your vaccine? Nobody, the powers that be were entirely united in that quest and went to extreme lengths to force people to take the shots over and over.
The CNN article goes on to embarrass itself further. Apparently they're salty that "Carlson routinely and cynically argues that sources like the CDC and CNN cannot be trusted", lol. The rest of the article is quoting random people who had appeared on Fox at some point, most of whom go on to commit logical fallacies of various kinds.
I'm not in the US, don't receive Fox and never watch Tucker Carlson. Everything I know about this man I've read second hand from material at the edges of the US culture war, but if these two articles are representative then no wonder the man has huge audiences. The clarity of thought and accuracy in his monologue is light years beyond anything in the CNN article.
Agreed. When Tucker talked about the lab leak theory 3 years ago, it was racist and hateful and a completely false conspiracy theory. Turns out he was just way ahead of the curve.
If that was the only time, you could say "a stopped clock is right twice a day", but it's not. There are many other similar examples, and it appears Ukraine is in the process of becoming another one, as the foreign policy blob has already started walking back the "regime change in Russia" push.
Yep. The elites did actually try to force everyone to take the vax. That they failed doesn’t invalidate the observation.
You are just a delusional anti-vaxxer.
Sean Hannity is another gem. When he broadcast denials that water-boarding wasn’t torture, Christopher Hutchins, who supported the Iraq War, issued a challenge and bet. Both agreed to meet and be water-boarded and the money wagered would go to charity. Hitches showed up. Hannity was a no-show. Hitches went ahead and subjected himself to water-boarding. Hannity and Carlson are cowards.
I don't think I ever heard that story! https://www.newshounds.us/sean_hannity_confronted_politicon_waterboarding_cowardice_102819
That is a great story - I didn't know that.
Tucker may be opportunistic in the positions he is currently advocating. But the idea that until Trump he was a standard Republican is false.
Carlson has always been a bit of a heterodox right-winger.
In 199 he reported, with disgust, George Bush's support for execution of Karla Faye Tucker. Probably as Tucker himself is vehemently anti-death penalty. And repeatedly stated during Bush admin that he disliked the president.
In 2004 he renounced his own support for the Iraq War well before many liberals came around to that position.
Under Carlson, The Daily Wire was a center-right publication but didn't take the standard right-wing lines all the time. They hired people like Mickey Kaus for them.
Wasn’t the point of the article that Tucker moved from political discussion to generating anger as a way to increase his reach and popularity? What he was in the past and that difference now is exactly the point, no?
I regard the Tucker is "generating anger" accusation as just a dismissive rhetorical device.
Don't MSM newspapers create outrage by overplaying the number of black men killed by police, school shootings, etc?
If you don't like people emphasizing a particular news story or point of view, they're ginning up outrage. But for those you agree with it, they're just doing journalism.
Glad to see him go, but I’ve always had a hard time with the conventional wisdom that people like him are purely cynical and just exploiting bad feelings for the sake of ratings. I mean, they’re certainly doing that to some degree, but part of me has always thought that deep down they really do feel a lot of the resentment they’re peddling. Maybe it’s because I’ve personally known so many “conservative uncles” in real life who sincerely feel and express that seething anger towards all things coded as “left” or “woke” or “progressive.” Even when Carlson was knowingly distorting the truth, I always got the sense that the hate in his heart was very genuine. Maybe it all started when Jon Stewart humiliated him, maybe before. I just think it’s too easy to write people like that off as cynically selling snake oil to suckers. I think maybe, in a way, that’s easier for liberal-minded people like myself to accept, because how could anyone really feel so much anger towards so many innocuous things? And yet they do.
There are variations on cynical though. He might not believe exactly what he's saying but he might believe that *someone* needs to say it (perhaps in an ends-justify-the-means way) and if someone is going to make money saying it, why not him?
By way of analogy, lawyers are sometimes forced to take public positions they privately disagree with but justify because "everyone deserves their day in court" and what not.
As a Cynic, I like to point out a fascinating quirk of history. Cynical as we understand it, is a synonym for personalities such as amoral, self-dealing and manipulative. In classical Greece, the Cynics were the philosophical school who denounced amorality, self-dealing and manipulativeness and sought to break this pattern of the human condition and find a way for humans to live authentically and sincerely. They somehow became associated with advocating for the behaviors they stood against.
It’s in his psychological history just like Trump’s assholic behavior and my sometimes being a curmudgeon is. He probably is doing battle w ghosts. I know who/what my ghosts are and I STILL act out sometimes.
It's not necessarily binary. It's easier to get people angry with your lies when you've got to where you believe them yourself.
I agree in general, but his texts and emails to colleagues following 1/6 show a fair amount of cynicism about Fox's audience and business model
Why do you think the alteration of Tucker's views on the show were faked? People change over their lives (thank God). I started as a communist, then became a libertarian (in order to be a better communist -- read Marx if you don't know why) before adapting to a Burkean conservative. Countries face different problems at different times; only someone blindly committed to an ideology refuses to change his mind given changing circumstances.
"You tuned in to enrage yourself "
Maybe most Tucker viewers were just trying to enrage themselves (I know a couple who might fall into that category) but I tuned in for the same reason I listened to Rush Limbaugh's monologue: to hear about events that would simply not be covered anywhere else. (And besides: Rush was was funny even if you didn't always agree with him.)
Fooled? I couldn't care less if he comes by his opinions honestly. I disagree with him on just about everything else; but now there is not a single pundit on TV who opposes our never ending stupid wars that we ALWAYS have endless money for. And his criticism of Biden for arresting black socialists for being anti war. We have no national interest in Ukraine. You can think whatever you want about Putin, but if you think, after this, he is somehow going to pose any threat to the rest of Europe much less the US you are not a rational person capable of acting on anything but emotions. Clearly there is a market for anti-war views, what does it say about our supposedly free press that there is literally no one on TV news, no one at NYT, WaPo, Vox, Slate ect who has even the mildest criticism of our stupid endless wars?
Rules based national order? tell that to Kosovo.
Unprovoked war? Tell that to Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Everywhere we get involved we make things exponentially worse for everyone. We are not a stabilizing force on the world stage.
War is a racket, always has been always will be.
What ever happened to the anti-war Left?
Hillary the Hawk killed them. Or at least made it entirely clear they were not welcome in her party. She and her surrogates insisted at every turn that the only reason anyone didn't support her was because they were racist and sexist (just like she did in 2008). And then when she still didn't win her campaign released the Steele dossier, which her campaign illegally paid for, to blame it all on Putin.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
As opposed to good countries, that we let meddle in our elections, like Israel..
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusion/
And since neither the news nor the party are willing to admit fault, anyone on the left who so much as suggests that who controls the donbas isn't worth nuclear holocaust gets immediately shouted down as a Putin puppet, kremlin apologist, who loves Trump.
No one?
If that was sarcastic, then please do point out all the brave critics in the mainstream news I have apparently been missing.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/tucker-carlson-fox-news-rupert-murdoch
Rod Dreher (who knows Tucker personally) has confirmed this story. "The most popular news-talk television host on the air, was removed from his job because he gave a talk about good and evil that offended the amoral billionaire who runs the show." (from Rod's paywalled article on this subject)
If you haven't watched the Heritage Foundation speech the article references, you should: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebG2POkoHgU You may disagree, but it will help you understand how hungry Americans are to believe in something beyond themselves.
U.S. population 330 million. So, being generous, Carlson’s audience is 3 million. Wow, that’s 0.009%. Thankfully, Americans have something better to do than consume mainstream media.
A cursory look at mainstream media outlets, be it TV or newspapers, show the numbers aren’t much better. The mainstream media is anything but Main Street. The atomization of media is a plus. No longer are a handful of gatekeepers shifting what information is made available to the public. The mainstream media is a giant Skinner’s box, full of influencers trying to influence other influencers. Twitter, mainstream media’s assignment desk, is a good metaphor for most of media.
As for Carlson: who could forget when he was confronted by an outfitter in a Montana fishing shop. In a hushed tone, he pleaded with the outfitter not to have his daughter hear the verbal criticism. Unlike some of Carlson’s viewers, the outfitter didn’t threaten or assault Carlson but criticized his character. And Carlson immediately wanted to hide behind his daughter’s skirts. One wonders, how many other daughters have heard Carlson’s broadcast bile?
If Twitter is the assignment desk, Google is the AI managing editor. SEO determines not only what gets read, but it also informs the hiring and resource allocation decisions of what gets covered and who gets to cover it.
There's a second-order effect on what we see. SEO culture also creates a digital region, like the Sun Belt and the Rust Belt, called the Media Belt.
In the Media Belt, there are four gatekeepers: New York City, Washington, L.A. and the Bay Area. Stories with datelines from these cities; topics of finance, politics, entertainment and tech; and most of the consumers of said content live in these four metros -- all of these are reasons why SEO is dominated by finance/politics/entertainment/tech, because both the newsmakers and consumers of the content skew search results.
It's a big part of why local news is dying. If you live outside of these four metros, there's a 60% chance your newspaper is owned by a hedge fund (GateHouse/Gannett, Alden and McClatchy control some of the biggest chains). Your TV and radio stations are owned by non-network owned/operated conglomerates and your management and presentation decisions come to your market like Ikea furniture.
While I am no fan of TC, I was impressed with the balance Noah has shown in getting below the surface on why a phenom like Tucker exists at all. For me the hard question remains: has media (TV, social, podcasts, blogs posts) hijacked our ability to reason for ourselves, replacing thoughtful consideration with emotion-raking clickbait tidbits and is there even a way back, if we acknowledge it? Warhol's 15-minutes of fame idea has been surpassed to become 15 seconds or even nanoseconds of fame -- whatever we can get. Great article, Noah.
Good article but one minor quibble. Brute force grid searches are extremely inefficient. Tucker is too smart for that. Probably better described as a type of importance-sampling search.
Russian state television has already prepared his contract!