Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson criticized the media for pushing stories tying President Donald Trump and his associates to Russia that turned out to be false.
Carlson attributed this behavior from media outlets of promoting those stories to a desire to tell viewers what they wanted to hear and that he argued that was “corruption.”
Transcript as follows:
Diversity: Say the word five times and all is forgiven. It’s like magic – the progressive equivalent of the witch’s spell. The irony, though of course, is that diversity of thought is exactly what is missing in the American media at this moment.
Almost every reporter in Washington is hot on this Russia story. Those who dissent are attacked by their peers as collaborators, collaborating with Trump, or more ominously Putin himself. The result is to make everyone in the press dumber and more credulous.
Just yesterday, CNN had to fire three reporters after they published a go bogus story attempting to connect Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci with the Russian government.
Now the piece was clearly wrong — thinly sourced and puffy. And yet, this is the interesting part: no other American news outlets caught it. In the end, that story was exposed by something called Sputnik News. That’s a media company literally owned by the Russian government, ironically.
So the question is where were the watchdogs in our own press? They were, of course, hypnotized by their own preconceptions. The story confirmed their biases, therefore it had to be true even when it wasn’t.
By the way, it’s not just CNN. Remember that in December, The Washington Post claimed Russian intelligence had literally hacked our power grid in the country. Now that story was totally false in every detail. The Washington Post published it anyway.
Slate.com, meanwhile, ran a piece claiming the Trump organization had a secret server connection to Russia. That turned out to be false, too, published anyway.
Even reliable old CSPAN, probably the straightest news outlet in the world, great people there, but it still got caught up for a second in the red scare itself in January. They claimed to have been hacked by the Russian media. Never happened.
Now, part of this is just hysteria, the moment when you convince yourself that the monsters under your bed are real. But part of it is more sinister than that. It is the conscious decision to tell your viewers what they want to hear even when you know the core story is wrong. That’s called corruption and these tapes show it’s happening.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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