Last year at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference, Tucker Carlson was booed for suggesting that conservative media outlets should be more like the New York Times–that their reporters “go out, and they get the facts.” The Daily Caller, as a project, was meant to be a substantive outlet for right-leaning, but authentic journalism. With guys like Jon Ward on the payroll, it seemed like it really could have worked.
But it didn’t. For the past week, Carlson has been feeding his audience misleading stories about Journolist, the center-left email listserv of journalists and policy wonks. His story about “the media” plotting to “kill stories about Jeremiah Wright” was actually about liberal journalists signing an open letter criticizing ABC’s debate coverage. A story claiming “Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News” contained a single email from an academic, not a journalist, asking if the FCC could shut down Fox News.
Things only got more pathetic when the Caller published another story exposing the terrible secret that liberals like Obama and were happy when he got elected. I assume that was published because of Carlson’s belief that “partisanship” is a “species of intellectual corruption,” as though tribalism or deliberately misleading one’s audience were a form of intellectual honesty.
If in fact, the Caller had evidence that “the media” conspired to kill stories about Wright, that might be news. If he had evidence “journalists” wanted the FCC to shut down Fox News that might be a story. But Carlson had neither of these things. Each “story” was also laden with a triumphant spite–the value of each piece was more in the fact that Carlson was sticking it to those mean ol’ liberals as it was the content itself, which failed to live up to its billing. His reporter “went out and got the facts” and then shoehorned them into something conservatives might find exciting. He also left some out some important details–like his begging Ezra Klein to be let on Journolist, or the fact that a Daily Caller reporter was also on the list.
Matthew Yglesias wrote yesterday that you “would think conservatives would worry about the fact that a large portion of conservative media is dedicated to lying to conservatives.” When I first heard about Carlson’s remarks last year, I assumed that was his first order of concern. But the fact is, while liberals want to be reassured that they’re right and that their enemies are wrong, there is a massive audience of conservatives who actually don’t care whether something is true or not.
Rush Limbaugh likes to argue that liberals can’t compete on talk radio because they can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas. Sometime in the last few weeks, Carlson realized he was operating in a marketplace that didn’t want the product he originally wanted to sell. He couldn’t really find an audience for conservative journalism–but he knew that there was an audience for paranoid, conspiracy minded liberal bashing, and that’s the vein in which the Journolist stories that have quadrupled his site’s traffic have been produced.
There’s a scene in Mo’Better Blues, reproduced at the beginning of The Roots Album Things Fall Apart, where two jazz musicians, Shadow and Bleek, are arguing about the decline in the audience for jazz music. Shadow tells Bleek,”the people don’t come because you grandiose motherfuckers don’t play shit that they like. If you played the shit that they like, then people would come.”
Carlson has learned to play the shit that they like. But it has to sting that his biggest hit has been a mere flame-war with a group of liberals rather than the kind of substantive reporting that angered the RNC. The shit that they like is more Andrew Breitbart than Eli Lake. The shit that they like just isn’t the substantive, right-leaning journalism Carlson wanted to produce, and that reporters on his staff are perfectly capable of producing. It would be wrong to call Carlson a sellout because that would imply that he was still trying to do what he originally said he wanted to do. He simply surrendered.