TUCKER CARLSON IS WHAT HE PRETENDS TO BE

I'm a fan of Margaret Sullivan's work, so I'm sorry to read this column of hers in The Washington Post:

As Russia prepared to invade Ukraine, the biggest star on Fox News was busy doing what he does best: being thoroughly and appallingly wrong.

[Tucker Carlson] defended the murderous instigator Vladimir Putin....

Carlson insisted that Ukraine was not a democracy but a “pure client state” of the U.S. government. And, in a particularly obnoxious rant, he suggested that Putin is morally superior to “permanent Washington,” some vaguely malign force that Carlson claims is manufacturing a global pandemic, teaching children to embrace racial discrimination and trying to snuff out Christianity.

Carlson’s pro-Putin act is so helpful that Russian state television has been rebroadcasting it with Russian subtitles.

But, says Sullivan, all this is less than it seems.

... it’s important to remember what Carlson is: nothing more than an outrage machine. What he offers is not political commentary. It’s Fox-approved nonsense meant to juice ratings — and it works.

Don’t take my word for it. In 2020, Fox’s own lawyers successfully made the case in court that Carlson shouldn’t be taken seriously. And a Trump-appointed federal judge agreed.

U.S. District Court Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil echoed Fox’s own arguments in finding that Carlson didn’t commit slander when he accused a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, of extortion, after the National Enquirer bought her story of an affair with Trump and then promptly shelved it on his behalf.

Why not? Because, Vyskocil decided, the whole tenor of Carlson’s show makes it clear to viewers that he is not stating “actual facts” about his topics.

“Whether the Court frames Mr. Carlson’s statements as ‘exaggeration,’ ‘non-literal commentary,’ or simply bloviating for his audience,” she wrote, “the conclusion remains the same — the statements are not actionable.”

She added: “Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statement he makes.”

That’s the problem, of course. Too many in Carlson’s audience simply don’t arrive with that measure of doubt or disbelief. They swallow his nonsense whole.

Yes, Sullivan says, the ignorant rubes fall for rhetoric so obviously nonsensical that anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence can see right through it! And a Trump judge agreed that Carlson's commentary is all fake! Well, of course a Trump judge agreed. Agreeing with that characterization of Carlson got Trump's favorite TV channel off the hook in McDougal's lawsuit.

The fact that Carlson and his employer told a judge his political opinions are fake means nothing. In the 1960s, a podiatrist wrote a letter saying that young Donald Trump had bone spurs that made him a bad candidate for military service at the time of the Vietnam War. This was an effective letter, but that doesn't mean it was a truthful one.

I don't know whether Tucker Carlson believes what he says on TV every weeknight. But even if he doesn't believe his own words, they clearly aren't intended to be received as "exaggeration" or "non-literal commentary." In the monologue Sullivan cites, Carlson said:

Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?

He said this to people who very literally believe that America is run by a liberal elite that calls white conservatives racists, tries to get them fired for "incorrect" opinions, ships American jobs overseas (well, there's some truth here, even if this isn't liberalism), and ginned up a fake pandemic that it sustains under false pretenses. They believe this liberal elite forces the children of white conservatives to be indoctrinated in racial self-hate at school, encourages China to ship massive quantities of fentanyl to America, and labors to purge America of Christianity.

Carlson may or may not believe all this, but if you demagogically affirm dangerous beliefs to an audience that shares them, you're not an entertainer or a performance artist -- you're more like a dealer of dangerous and addicting drugs, which are still dangerous even if you personally don't partake.

There's a snobbery in what Sullivan writes -- the yokels should know better. But telling people untruths that they're already inclined to believe doesn't just work on the unlettered. In 2002 and 2003, many highly educated people believed that Saddam Hussein had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. The people who told us he had these weapons weren't engaged in "non-literal commemtary." Whether they believed this or not, they sure as hell wanted us to believe it.

It doesn't matter what Carlson believes. I agree with Kurt Vonnegut's line in Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about what we pretend to be." Mother Night's protagonist isn't a Nazi true believer, but he broadcasts propaganda on the Nazis' behalf. Carlson broadcasts propaganda too. He might or might not believes what he says, but his beliefs are irrelevant if millions of other people believe him.