Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson on Monday eviscerated CNN for its coverage of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and took aim at the network’s president Jeff Zucker, saying he should be running a car wash instead of overseeing a major news outlet.
In a segment criticizing CNN’s Russia conspiracies, Carlson accused CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter of doing Zucker’s bidding by attempting to downplay the network’s near-constant focus on it.
“The ‘greatest value add.’ That’s how CNN sums up its role in the Russia story,” said Carlson after rolling a clip from Stelter’s weekly program Reliable Sources.
“Does a single person believe that? Of course not. Not one person. Jeff Zucker himself doesn’t believe that,” the Fox News Channel host went on. “And that’s why he sent out his marionette to lie, as you just saw. Jeff Zucker is an anxious man tonight: he’s been caught doing the one thing journalists are not allowed to do. He intentionally misled his audience.”
“In a fair world, Zucker would be running a car wash, or selling time-shares in Cancun. He would not be in the news business. Zucker himself knows that very well. He knows he’s an impostor,” he added. “In a fair world, CNN wouldn’t call itself a news network at all. It’s far less than that, and it has been for a long time.”
Carlson’s remarks are the last in the war of words between the Fox News Channel and CNN. Earlier this March, Zucker described the Fox News Channel as “propaganda network” and argued the Democrat National Committee had “no obligation” to hold a debate on the network.
“I think the consternation about this is a little misplaced,” said Zucker. “They don’t have to give one to CNN, they don’t have to give one to NBC. They have no obligation to give one to Fox,” before adding “I think the question should be, is Fox state-run TV or is the White House state-run government by Fox TV?”
Meanwhile, Zucker appears unrepentant for CNN’s coverage the debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory after special counsel Robert Mueller concluded President Trump’s campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.
In an interview with the New York Times, Zucker contended he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s coverage, arguing it was given such intense focus because of its importance. “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” he wrote in an email. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”