Max Oden/Sipa USA via AP Images
An attendee wearing a shirt featuring Fox News host Tucker Carlson at the Politicon convention in 2019
It was a big week for lying on Fox as well as on other Murdoch properties. There were hysterics about the entirely imaginary Biden plan to ban hamburgers, lies about what John Kerry told the Iranians about Israeli attacks on Syria, and front-page screaming headlined stories in the Murdoch-owned New York Post about copies of Kamala Harris’s book allegedly being force fed to migrant children (or something, in a piece was taken down and then repurposed and edited, a process that led the reporter, Laura Italiano, who said she was forced to write it, to quit her job. Shocker: the edited version remained riddled with falsehoods.)
The term “jumping the shark” dates from a 1977 episode of “Happy Days” in which Fonzie literally jumped over a shark on water skis for no apparent reason save that people were growing tired of the same old whining about girls from Richie and Ralphie. In its metaphorical sense, the expression has since come to mean “finally went batshit crazy after hovering on just this side of sanity for a period of time.” The phrase, you will perhaps not be shocked to read, pops up an awful lot in Google searches that combined with the words “Fox News.”
The super-smart folks who write Politico’s daily Playbook did not mention sharks when asking earlier this week, “IS TUCKER CARLSON LOSING HIS MIND?” But I’m betting I’m not the only person to whom the phrase also occurred. The Playbook geniuses admitted “that some people may believe that Tucker ‘lost it long ago.’” (I see the hashtag “#TuckerCarlsonMustGo” trending on twitter and The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan gets a little closer to the real issue with a column titled, “Tucker Carlson’s latest idiocy on masks is dangerous and hypocritical even by his usual standards.”) “But as careful students of his evening show,” Politico’s Mensa mavens continued, “we’ve noticed that Carlson has gradually become more unhinged in recent weeks.” Their reasons: “He’s devoted enormous attention to apologias for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. He seemed noticeably perturbed the night that Derek Chauvin was found guilty. And under the banner of just asking questions! he has given quarter to anti-vaxxers and COVID-19 conspiracists.”Here is what, in another context, might be called Tucker’s “money shot,” as Politico cites him saying: “Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart … Call the police immediately, contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives.”
True, Tucker’s rant is both nonsensical and potentially dangerous. But it is no more evidence of a lost mind than almost anything Tucker has been saying since he was given the job of replacing Bill O’Reilly during the 2016 parade of Fox paying tens of millions of dollars to its impressively deep roster of sexual predatory anchors and executives to please go away. His masked-child rant followed by just a few days Carlson’s on-air meltdown when his guest, the former new York City deputy sheriff Ed Gavin, reacted with common sense to Tucker’s leading questions about the allegedly catastrophic impact on policing and public safety that would, in his view, follow the verdict in the George Floyd murder trial. Just a couple of weeks earlier, the extremely-indulgent-when-it-comes-right-wingers Anti-Defamation League had felt compelled to call on Fox to fire Carlson for his embrace of the “replacement” meme so popular with anti-Semites, like, for instance, Donald Trump’s “very fine people” (the guys chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville in 2017, amid considerable Nazi regalia).
“Finally Losing His Mind?” I don’ thin so, Lucy. Here is Media Matters’ compilation of white Supremacist language used by Carlson that dates back to 2006. And that’s just one category of Tuckerisms.
I used to know Tucker a little bit a long time ago; I think we had lunch when he was working at The Weekly Standard, and we did a debate together at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2008, which you can watch, if you are really bored, here. You may find this hard to believe, but Tucker was once a quite a good journalist when he wanted to be. For instance, I almost (!) wish I had written this terrific Carlson piece, (and you won’t believe the topic). Tina Brown was right when she told the Columbia Journalism Review “Tucker is a tremendously good writer and I always thought it was a real shame that he kind of like got sucked into this TV mania thing.” Personally, I cannot believe he is crazy enough to believe the lunacy he regularly spouts on Fox. What I do believe is that he is cynical enough to keep wholesaling whatever crazy notions he comes up with if he thinks his audience will appreciate them.
And so far, he’s been right. If his idiot fans who are not in on the joke start harassing small children—who may be, say, wearing masks because they have cancer or some other sickness that makes them especially vulnerable—much less calling the cops on them, well, that’s not Tucker’s problem. As the Dominion Voting Systems demonstrated, you have to sue Fox, or any other Murdoch property, for no less than a billion dollars to get them to admit the truth after they’ve been caught lying about it. As for Tucker, 10 to 20 million bucks a year makes up for a great deal of what most people would consider shame, or at least embarrassment.
What Tucker’s shameless nuttiness tells us about Fox is that for its big money men (and women), it is all a con. Tucker, Laura Ingraham, and many of the other lying racists who specialize in making America ungovernable by ginning up lies to excite the yahoos know just what they are doing. I worked with Laura every day during the founding of MSNBC back the around the time when she was dating Lawrence Summers and playing the “reasonable” conservative on TV. CBS News even paired her with Bill Bradley, as if the two were both somehow representative of the spectrum of responsible political opinion. When I worked for the Center for American Progress, we took her along on a trip—I think to the Aspen Comedy Festival or else the Sundance Film Festival—and I appeared with her on a panel sponsored by The New York Times. Laura was not the frothing racist she plays on TV today, and I’d be surprised if she is in private either. (I wrote a column about her in 1997, but we have not spoken in probably 15 years.) She just plays one on TV.
When did Laura start playing the current racist monster version of herself, spouting evil, destructive nonsense like this? I don’t know—but I do know it’s been awfully profitable. Clearly, she must find it relatively easy to live with the trade-offs she’s made. After all, when your checkbook, your ratings, your producer, your make-up person, your personal assistant, your agent, your driver, your masseuse et al can’t stop talking about how smart, brave and hey, sexy, you are, I imagine it’s not so hard to believe it. As a character in Richard Russo’s 2019 novel, Chances Are ..., observes, “That’s the thing about lies, right? Individually, they don’t amount to much. But you never know how many others you’ll need to tell to protect that first one. And damned if they don’t add up. Over time they all get tangled up, until one day you realize it isn’t even the lies themselves that matter, it’s that somehow lying has become your default mode and the person you lie to most is yourself.”
One thing that doesn’t lie, however, is the Murdoch family balance sheet. As long as Fox keeps earning its billions of dollars each year, they’re continually confirmed in their belief that the difference between truth and lies doesn’t matter at all; it’s all the same to them. What I want to know is why, in the rest of the media—the people who not only do not profit from Fox’s lies, but are forced to swim in the waters it pollutes—continue to treat it as a legitimate news source. We all would be better off if all those old white folks suffering not from “racism” but from “economic insecurity” spent their time watching the fifth season of “Happy Days.” In the meantime, journalists should shun the people who are ruining their profession—and our democracy along with it.
Also, could somebody please give Ms. Italiano a job at a real news organization?
Odds and Ends
It’s warming up, and I’ve not seen many major outdoor shows planned for this summer at places like Tanglewood or Jones Beach that we can look forward to. In the meantime, snuggle up with a video of a young James Taylor and Carly Simon singing “You Can Close Your Eyes.”
Now here’s James Taylor with Yo-Yo Ma singing “Here Comes the Sun.”
Here are James Taylor and Joni Mitchell singing together in 50-minute performance in Paris in 1970.
Here’s an audio of Joni with Neil Young singing “Raised on Robbery.”
Here’s an early version of CSNY (really “Y) singing “Birds” from Déjà vu (again).
Finally, here’s a delightful Linda Ronstadt singing “Different Drum.”
See you next week.
