The miserable, squalid campaign to stifle Tucker Carlson
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The Fox News host’s only real crime is daring to be provocative in a dull media world.
Tucker Carlson Tonight is the best show on American news television. It is not, as his tedious enemies insist, Trump propaganda. Quite the opposite: it is a rare bright spot of originality in an otherwise arid media landscape.
Every night, almost without fail, Carlson introduces his 3.2 million viewers to an interesting thought or a different way of looking at the world. TV news is repetitive; that is its nature. But Carlson’s show manages to cover the talking points in a different key. He also introduces new opinions and ideas into the media bloodstream.
That’s why Carlson is popular among young people: he is radical.
Carlson takes seriously his catchphrase about being ‘the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.’ That’s why so many dishonest, self-important, conceited arseholes are determined to destroy him.
That’s why reports that corporate advertisers are pulling out of his show are gleefully recirculated by media hacks who normally pretend to be anti-corporations. It’s also why Media Matters, the murky media watchdog, has been digging through his long history of broadcasting, looking for things that might be deemed unacceptable.
Media Matters has just published some clips of Carlson saying some coarse stuff on a silly shock-jock show. These are not his finest moments, to put it mildly, though he is clearly just trying to enter the spirit of a fairly juvenile show.
That’s the thing. It’s Carlson’s very open-mindedness that most angers his enemies. Carlson’s real crime isn’t that he has said something dumb in his past, or that he has lost his temper, or even that he is too right wing to be acceptable to mainstream media. It is that he dares to be provocative in a media world that is suffocatingly dull. That, for many, is unforgivable.
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