Why media covers Tucker Carlson
Fox News host Tucker Carlson said something revealing on a podcast last fall: “I lie if I’m cornered or something. I lie.”
Is he feeling cornered now? There are conceptual overlaps between some of Carlson’s on-air themes and a 180-page screed allegedly authored by Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old suspect in the shootings at a Buffalo supermarket that killed 10 people and injured three others last Saturday. Eleven of the 13 shot were Black.
Carlson’s response? Deflection and omission.
After briefing his viewers Monday night on the Buffalo massacre, Carlson dug into the document. “It’s definitely racist, bitterly so. Gendron reduces people to their skin color. That’s the essence of racism, and it is immoral,” said Carlson. “But what he wrote does not add up to a manifesto. It is not a blueprint for new extremist political movement, much less the potential inspiration for a racist revolution. …
“The document is not recognizably left-wing or right-wing, it’s not really political at all. The document is crazy.
“He writes like the mental patient he is—disjointed, irrational, paranoid,” Carlson said.
From there, the host pivoted into denunciations of Democrats’ reactions to the tragedy. “Within minutes of Saturday’s shooting before all of the bodies of those 10 murdered Americans had even been identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a coordinated campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents,” he railed.
A New York Times analysis in April found that in more than 400 episodes of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” the host has “amplified the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration.” The document linked to the shooting suspect also expresses an obsession with replacement: “Due to the threat of ethnic replacement and our own horribly low birth rates, we do not have 150 years or even 50 years to achieve positions of power,” it says, among many other references to the conspiracy theory.
In fairness to the host, the document does not say its writer watched “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and iterations of the great replacement theory abound on racist sites. The writer got his “current beliefs” off the Internet, the document says.
On his Tuesday night show, Carlson pretended to address the issue at hand. “You’ve heard a lot about the ‘great replacement’ theory recently. It’s everywhere in the last two days, and we’re still not sure exactly what it is,” said Carlson. Uncertainty notwithstanding, Carlson attempted to flip the script, slamming Democrats for having a politically motivated immigration policy.
Diversity is a dirty word for Carlson. The Buffalo suspect appears to have agreed with the Fox News host on this point, so much so that his tract veers toward intellectual appropriation. The online document says:
“Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It is spoken like a mantra and repeated ad infinitum ‘diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength, diversity is our greatest strength …. Said throughout the media, spoken by politicians, educators and celebrities. But no one ever seems to give a reason why.”
Here’s Carlson on the same topic in September 2018:
“How, precisely, is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it. Can you think, for example, of other institutions such as, I don’t know, marriage or military units in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are?”
Although Carlson’s comments sparked a backlash at the time, he retreated not an inch on the following show, arguing that the doctrine was accepted as an article of faith. “What’s striking is that nobody has ever bothered to explain exactly how” diversity is our greatest strength, he said.
That’s false. Rudy Giuliani, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are among the national figures who’ve uttered eloquent affirmations of diversity’s importance.
Along with the replacement-theory echo, the similar passages on diversity have triggered criticism and commentary. Citing The New York Times’ analysis, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Monday, “This is a poison being spread by one of the largest news organizations in our country.”
In the nearly six years since Carlson’s prime-time Fox News program launched, there has been debate about the copious media coverage of his rhetorical atrocities. Why provide oxygen to the sort of outrage that Fox News has used to boost its own ratings?
Buffalo is why. It’s irrelevant whether the shooter derived his opinions from Carlson’s show. What matters is that these views are expressions of irrational anger prone to spill into violence. And Carlson uses all of his guile to avoid that topic.