The Tucker Con

Tucker Carlson has something for everyone: he has conspiracy theories of all flavors, he has racism, he has sexism, trans-phobia, antisemitism and, I must admit, his right-wing populism strikes close to the heart of the matter on some occasions.

In my post Anti-Vaccine Lies I highlighted how one YouTuber twisted words, misquoted articles and misinterpreted statistics in order to spread fear about the corona vaccines. This YouTuber is just one of many of course, but all of them together don't even come close to the awe-inspiring heap of lies and dog-whistled fear-mongering that is Tucker Carlson. His show "Tucker Carlson Tonight" sits in the popular 8 p.m. time-slot and attracts millions of viewers every night; in July 2020, Tucker Carlson Tonight broke the record for highest-rated program in U.S. cable news history, garnering an average nightly audience of 4.33 million viewers, and it's still the most popular news show in America according to the latest scores from August 2021. This is a problem. Democracy can only function when the public is well informed, but Fox News and Tucker Carlson are a hotbed of misinformation. Not that it's very much better on the other side, mind you; CNN and MSNBC viewers are likely to be the receivers of exaggerated claims about traditional liberal issues, such as the number of unarmed people of color murdered by the police, or the effects of climate-change, which are grossly overestimated when they answer questions about these issues. This is a problem as well. And when we combine these problems, we get, in the cable news landscape, a perfect reflection of the polarization infused by both political parties.

I want to focus on Fox News and Tucker Carlson though, because with them the misinformation is a long standing tradition. Already in 2012 there was this study that blew up in the news, which concluded that Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All. Tucker Carlson, who continues a tradition set by Bill O'Reilly, is the network's most popular and most watched anchor, and oh boy, how anyone can take anything this man says seriously is beyond me. I've tried to watch some of his broadcasts but never managed to get by the introductory monologue. Not once. He somehow manages to turn each and every topic he touches into a partisan rant. Even when he "reported" on the death of Colin Powell, his monologue spun off into a rant about how America is being overrun by a Biden dictatorship in which a new form of apartheid or segregation has taken foothold; the vaccinated against the unvaccinated. How? As far as I know, vaccinations are not mandatory, and in most cases people can still go to their jobs unvaccinated if they get tested regularly. That's a choice, isn't it? Not a mandate.

"But my freedom... I refuse to comply!" That's what it all comes down to, isn't it? Don't think, by the way, that this is uniquely American; here in Europe and in my country, The Netherlands, I hear plenty people make the same arguments. But let me ask you this: why do you stop when the traffic-light is red? Why do you comply? Why not whine about "your freedom" all the other times the government forces you to adhere to rules? The fact of the matter is this: you stop at a red light because you know that a certain amount of "your freedom" needs to be sacrificed for the sake of living in a secure, organized and, yes, FREE society. Didn't we all get outraged, and rightly so, when we heard cases, in the 1980s, of people with AIDS who had sex while THEY KNEW they had AIDS? Tucker Carlson is the anti-vaxxers' Grand Vizier as he constantly stokes skepticism about Covid-19 vaccines. How many people have died because of this? Does he even care? And why does anyone listen to him or his colleagues at Fox News? Nearly all Fox staffers vaccinated for Covid even as hosts cast doubt on vaccine:

The vast majority of employees at Fox Corporation, the umbrella company for the conservative Fox News channel, are vaccinated against coronavirus and those who are not will be required to do daily testing, according to a memo sent out from bosses – despite some of its biggest screen stars questioning the vaccine.
_{source: The Guardian}

But let's not dwell on vaccinations again. Like I said in the introduction: Tucker has so much more in his arsenal, as can be seen in the below linked video. And let me also repeat and stress that the liberal mainstream media doesn't do a much better job at informing their viewers. A recent poll by the Heartland Institute found that "those who favor CNN or MSNBC know even less than those who prefer Fox News or who don’t watch cable television at all." It has to be said though that Heartland is a conservative and libertarian public policy think tank known for its rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking. So I'm not inclined to put much faith in that poll, and reading the linked article it seems that the questions in that poll were about topics that are of much more interest to a right-wing public, like the federal government's total debt or the top marginal tax rate. To be "fair and balanced," here's an article about that poll: Survey finds Fox viewers better informed than CNN, MSNBC viewers. For now though, watch how Tucker Carlson misleads his audience of millions each and every night...

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