This is one of those memorable clips that comes around from time to time. Joe Scarborough played it twice on his show today because he “wanted people to see what they were defending.” It’s all up there, replacement theory, horrific shots at both Ilhan Omar and Ketanji Brown Jackson, this is vintage Tucker Carlson, which means pure, unvarnished racism and misogyny.
Fox News ran with all this awfulness for many years and got away with it. They shouldn’t have endorsed the Big Lie. That was their undoing. They might have kept going for many more years on simple bigotry, which was their stock in trade.
The supercut is two minutes, the entire clip seven and a half. It’s worth the listen.
Two big questions now: Is Tucker going to go over to Newsmax, where they are begging him to roost and doing more of the same? There’s a strong possibility that he may just put together his own show, doing a podcast, not affiliating himself with any network.
And how does Fox continue to fare? Carlson may take a third of Fox’s viewers with him wherever he goes. He became the face of Fox News. Evening ratings are tanking over there right now.
Thomas Gift is founding director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London. He told Newsweek that Carson’s departure will be a big blow for Fox News, and increase the challenge from other right-wing networks like Newsmax.
Gift said: “It’s hard to overestimate Carlson’s importance to Fox News. The massive ratings that he was able to bring in, combined with the precipitous drop in viewership at the 8 p.m. EDT hour since he left, is reflective of just how much Carlson had become the face of the Fox News franchise.
“The network’s leadership seems to think he’s replaceable, but that might prove overly optimistic,” Gift added. “Just because in the past viewers have stuck with Fox News after, for example, the departure of Bill O’Reilly or Megyn Kelly doesn’t mean they’ll continue to do so post-Carlson. That’s especially true now with the growth of so many new alternative outlets, like Newsmax, where viewers can get their right-wing fix.”
In the week following his departure, Fox News ratings on what had been Carlson’s 8 p.m. timeslot collapsed by 56 percent, averaging just 1.4 million. According to The Washington Post, viewership of Fox News in its entirety fell by 45 percent last week, compared to the final week Carlson was being broadcast.
Wow. 56% down. Double wow. They did it to themselves. Fox News, like Icarus, flew too high. They had a tidy operation going with the nightly racism and misogyny dirge and should have just stayed on brand. Once they got into election conspiracy and endorsed the Big Lie, they went down the rabbit hole. They just may stay down there.
I thought it interesting that Joe assigned this racist bent common to almost every Republican I have ever known to some dark corner of the Right. Of course Joe is/was ??? a Republican, so I guess he doesn’t want to be lumped in with the others. Have you ever noticed how they call any black politician that doesn’t like the way white politicians (Republicans) do things a racist?