Without Trace of Irony, Tucker Carlson Asks Viewers to ‘Imagine’ Fox News Repeating Libelous Attacks
Tucker Carlson opened Wednesday’s show by asking his viewers to imagine Fox News making libelous attacks — one day after the network agreed to pay $787.5 million in a record defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.
It was an odd remark that seemed to come straight from Carlson’s playbook of “say the most outrageous and potentially controversial thing that would cause a stir and piss off Fox News executives.”
Carlson’s segment came the day after a brutally embarrassing day for Fox News in which they agreed to pay close to a billion dollars over their repeated false claims about Dominion and its role in the 2020 general election. Those false claims, in service to the stolen election conspiracy theory, are ones on which they still haven’t entirely come clean on air, seeing as former President Donald Trump — the presumptive favorite for the GOP nomination — continues to promote the theory and they continue to pretend he isn’t.
“Sometimes you wonder just how filthy and dishonest our news media are,” Carlson opened, again, the day after Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle claims they repeatedly lied about an election. He then posited a scenario in which the US government mandated the purchase of a MyPillow pillow because why not give Fox’s top advertiser some free earned media?
Read the opening monologue yourself:
Ask yourself, is any news organization you know of so corrupt that it’s willing to hurt you on behalf of its biggest advertisers? Anyone who would do that is obviously Pablo Escobar-level corrupt and should not be trusted. What would that look like? That level of corruption? Well, imagine that the Trump administration had made it mandatory for American citizens to buy MyPillow. That’s one of Fox News’s biggest advertisers.
Imagine the administration declared that if you didn’t rush out and buy at least one MyPillow and then at least another booster pillow, you would not be allowed to eat out. You couldn’t reenter your own country. You couldn’t have a paying job. Mypillow They told you the straight face was the very linchpin of our country’s public health system. No matches. They told you that that Fox as a news organization endorsed it, amplified the government’s message.
Imagine if Fox News attacked anyone who refused to buy MyPillow as an ally of Russia, as an enemy of science. And then imagine that Fox kept up those libelous attacks, even as evidence mounted that MyPillow caused heart attacks, fertility problems and death. If Fox News did that, what would you think of Fox News? Would you trust us? Of course you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know that we were liars.
Thank heaven Fox News never did anything like that. But the other channels did. The other channels took hundreds of millions of dollars from big pharma companies, and then they shelled for their sketchy products on the air. And as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products. At the very least, this was a moral crime. It was disgusting, but it was universal. It happened across the American news media. They all did it. So at this point, the question isn’t who in public life is corrupt? Too many to count. The question is who is telling the truth?
I will say that he does make one salient point here, one I have written about also. The massive marketing budgets of “Big Pharma” underwrite a massive amount of cable news programming — including Fox News — and so it’s difficult to imagine that not having some sort of impact on any critical reporting on any of the medications one sees advertised ad nausea on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
But Carlson’s conspiratorial rant that the Government and Big Pharma and the media were in cahoots during a pandemic that killed over 1.1 million American citizens? Please.
And Carlson’s “Imagine Fox News being libelous” gambit? Given the events of the last week, not a difficult thing to imagine, at all.
Watch above via Fox News.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
