| We will leave it up to the reader
to determine whether Tucker Carlson has made serious errors in in judgment. Tucker
has seemed to support a Conservative Christian position especially when it comes to Church
and State issues. It is apparent from the data collected, that Ethical Values and
the first amendment may be in danger from his past and future actions.
Tucker Carlson's office like others we called, stated
that his position is that no religion but Christianity is a "Real"
religion." What is a real religion, Mr. Carlson? What you have been
practicing? Read the following and remember: "By their Works may they be
known." This is a summary of information collected from several sources about
Tucker Carlson.
(Remember it is best to investigate on your own when
looking at allegations about anyone. Don't believe us, think for
yourself and investigate for yourself! And remember, the Religious Freedom Coalition
does not represent any political party nor do we recommend any political candidate, nor
are we involving ourselves in the political process. This information is only for
students of Tucker Carlson)
Tucker Carlson
Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson
(born May 16, 1969) is a multi-named television pundit, a former
bow-tie wearer, and a dick. His insufferability was inflicted on
America – or at least that tiny fraction of America that watches MSNBC
– for three hours every weekday on the eponymous show Tucker, which aired at 4pm, 6pm and 2am ET, until it was canceled on March 10, 2008.
Journalism career
Carlson’s career as a journalist reached its brief peak in 1999 with
his profile of Number One traitor George W. Bush in the debut issue of
Tina Brown’s Talk magazine. When Bush mentioned that he’d seen an interview in which
Larry King
asked the soon-to-be-executed Texas murderer Karla Faye Tucker what she
would say to then-Governor Bush if she had the chance to meet with him,
Carlson asked Bush what she answered. This provided a set-up for one of
the greatest moments of nastiness in the history of mankind, duly
reported by Carlson: “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock
desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’” This is the only sentence ever written
by Carlson that is worth reading.
“Journalism” career
Carlson’s career as a “journalist” began in 2000 with his co-hosting of CNN’s The Spin Room,
on which he represented the right against liberal Bill Press. The show
was quickly cancelled, and Carlson began alternating with Robert
Novak as the conservative co-host of Crossfire, one of the major
conservative partisan horrors in the annals of broadcasting.
Despite his having appeared on hundreds of Crossfire programs, the only episode anyone remembers is the one from October 15, 2004, when Daily Show
host Jon Stewart berated Carlson and his liberal co-host Paul Begala for their “partisan hackery” and begged them to “stop hurting
America.” Carlson told Stewart, “I do think you’re more fun on your
show,” and Stewart told Carlson, “You’re as big a ass h__le on your show as
you are on any show.” Less than three months later, Carlson learned
that CNN would not be renewing his contract and he signed with MSNBC.
Rape charge
Carlson wrote his autobiography, Politicians, Partisans and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News,
in 2003, at the ripe old age of 34. The book, which no one has ever
seen a copy of, reportedly contains the revelation that Carlson was
once accused of rape by a mentally disturbed woman he’d never met in
Louisville, Kentucky, a city he’d never set foot in.
Neckwear
On April 11, 2006, Carlson announced his decision to cease wearing
bow ties, a dweeby affectation (shared by fellow pundit George
Will) for which he was appropriately ridiculed over the years. “I just
decided I wanted to give my neck a break,” he explained, oblivious to
how many viewers also wanted to give his neck a break.
Terpsichorean exploits
In 2006, apparently believing that he wasn’t on TV enough, Carlson competed on the ABC reality series Dancing With the Stars.
On September 13, 2006, his boldly exhibited preternatural inability to
dance resulted in his being the first contestant to be voted off the
show. Nonetheless, Carlson appears to take some perverse pride in the
whole thing, as he continues to include this humiliating performance in
his official MSNBC bio, where he remains a contributor/wiener.
AS RECENTLY REPORTED BY MEDIA MATTERS:
How
Conservative Pundits use each others Lies and False Statements to Smear anyone they don't
agree with.
In the weeks since former Vice President Al Gore became
Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, The
Daily Howler's Bob Somerby wrote extensively about news reports and commentary about
Gore's win that have failed to note the brutal and often false savaging Gore experienced
at the hands of the media during his presidential campaign. Looking at the first news
reports about Gore's award, a similar thought occurred to me: so many of those reports
focused on whether Gore would again run for president, yet they made no mention of the
primary reason he is not president today -- years of news reports (led by The New York
Times and The Washington Post, not Fox News) that falsely portrayed Gore as a
liar and childishly mocked him for his clothes.
It's a story that has been told many times, by countless
people. And yet we keep telling it, and we sometimes criticize others for not telling it.
Why? Simple: because it is important, because horrible media coverage of progressives
didn't stop with
Al Gore, and because not enough people are aware of it.
Editor & Publisher recently
reported
on a new poll of Americans' attitudes toward the news media:
A new Gallup poll released today show[s] a wide gap
between how Republicans and Democrats view the mass media. Nearly 3 in 4 Republicans say
the media is "too liberal."
[...]
[Gallup director Frank] Newport explains:
"Republicans in America today remain deeply distrustful of the national news media --
in sharp contrast to Democrats, who have a great deal more trust in the media's
accuracy." Exactly twice as many Democrats (66%) express some faith in the media
compared with Republicans (33%).
More than twice as many Americans say the news media are
too liberal (45%) rather than too conservative (18%). But Newport adds: "Americans'
views of the bias in news media are highly related -- as would be expected -- to
underlying political orientation."
Some 22% of Democrats find the media "too
conservative," but this is a much lower number than the Republican assertion [that
the media are too liberal] (77%).
Between the media's treatment of Gore and their handling
of the run-up to the Iraq war, how can Democrats have so much faith in the media and
Republicans so little? There are probably a large number of factors that play a role, but
two seem obvious: The American people are rarely told about the media's peddling of
conservative misinformation, and they are frequently told that the media are
"liberal."
The October 16 edition of MSNBC's Tucker provides
an excellent, if infuriating, case study. Host Tucker Carlson and his two journalist
guests peddled a steady stream of conservative misinformation -- and at the same time
suggested that the very cable channel on which they were doing so is biased against
conservatives.
Carlson led A.B. Stoddard of The Hill and
Josephine Hearn of the Politico in a discussion of an allegation that, in 1992,
Hillary Clinton listened to a recording of a telephone call held by political adversaries
of her husband. The allegation first appeared in Her Story, the Clinton biography
released earlier this year and written by New York Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr.
and Jeff Gerth, formerly of the Times. The sole citation Gerth and Van Natta
provided for the allegation read, in full, "Author interview with former campaign
aide present at the tape playing in 2006."
Her Story was
poorly
received when it was released months ago, perhaps because it was
heavily reliant
on anonymous sources like the "former campaign aide" who made the
telephone-recording allegation, and perhaps because of the authors'
history of
dubious
reporting. In
any case, the phone allegation was almost universally ignored.
Nevertheless, Carlson declared Tuesday evening that
"rumors of scandal" might disrupt Clinton's presidential campaign:
CARLSON: A new book out by a pair of Pulitzer
Prize-winning New York Times reporters makes a startling claim. Back in 1992, it
says, Hillary Clinton allegedly eavesdropped on the phone calls of her husband's political
opponents. Some Republicans say that smacks of hypocrisy especially since Senator Clinton
criticizes the warrantless wiretapping of suspected terrorists -- trouble for Hillary
Clinton?
In fact, Her Story isn't new, and it wasn't the
reason Carlson devoted a segment to the allegation -- Carlson later admitted he hasn't
even read the book. So why did Carlson, Stoddard, and Hearn --
along with other
media figures -- devote so much time to such a vague and thinly sourced allegation in
a months-old book that nobody much cared about at the time?
Perhaps because the GOP told them to. This flurry of
media attention began with an
article
in The Hill laying out the Republicans' plan to attack Clinton over the allegation.
Republicans plan to seize on an allegation from the 1992
presidential campaign to tarnish Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) on the red-hot issue
of government surveillance.
[...]
Republicans are focusing on an allegation in a recent
book by two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, which suggests Clinton listened to a
secretly recorded conversation between political opponents.
[...]
A GOP official said, "Hillary Clinton's campaign
hypocrisy continues to know no bounds. It is rather unbelievable that Clinton would listen
in to conversations being conducted by political opponents, but refuse to allow our
intelligence agencies to listen in to conversations being conducted by terrorists as they
plot and plan to kill us. Team Clinton can expect to see and hear this over and over again
over the course of the next year."
By attributing the segment to revelations in a "new
book" (that isn't new and that he hadn't read) rather than to the fact that
Republican political operatives were criticizing Clinton, Carlson managed to give an air
of credibility to what was a thinly sourced partisan attack.
The Politico's Ben Smith
explained
how the Republican National Committee successfully (and dishonestly) used The Hill
to launder the eavesdropping allegation and make it appear more solid than it actually is:
The allegation was reported in passing, and without a
named source, in Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta's recent Hillary bio. I'm not sure about
other reporters; it caught my eye, and I tried and failed to confirm it with veterans of
that campaign.
Anyway, it's not really sourced in a way that it could
stand on its own, and got scant coverage when the book came out this summer.
So the RNC pushes it to the Hill. And today, RNC
co-chairman Mike Duncan sent out an e-mail with this assertion:
If you needed further proof that Hillary Clinton will do
anything to win, a Capitol Hill newspaper is now reporting that she eavesdropped on Bill's
political opponents during his time as governor of Arkansas.
Well, not really.
But the RNC couldn't have done it on its own: It needed
the help (intentional or not) of journalists who 1) reported the allegation and 2) did so
without noting the dubious sourcing -- sourcing that, according to Ben Smith, "could
not stand on its own." And, indeed, the Republicans' "plan to seize" on the
allegation was enough to spur several news reports. As Media Matters
noted yesterday,
Slate.com, National Review, CNN's Paula Zahn Now, ABC News' The Note, Fox
News' Fox & Friends, MSNBC's Tucker, The Washington Times, and The
American Spectator all reported the allegation without noting that it was based on a
single anonymous source.
Worse, the purported recollections by an anonymous source
of an event that supposedly happened 14 years prior was enough for some reporters to
flatly declare the event to have been illegal.
On Tucker, the first thing the Politico's
Hearn said was: "And it looks like it is illegal and was illegal then, in '92."
Later, Hearn all but invited an official investigation: "[Y]eah, I think it's a big
deal if somebody decides to investigate it." She then seemed to reverse herself,
noting, "I mean, it's 15 years old. I think, lacking an investigation, I don't know,
it seems pretty tenuous right now." But not too tenuous for her to declare it to have
been "illegal."
Nor did Hearn hesitate to defend the authors who brought
us this "tenuous" allegation; she falsely stated that Clinton's staff
"apparently ... never challenged anything in the book at all." Hearn was
presumably basing that statement on an identical claim by Gerth that was included in the
article in The Hill. But Gerth is hardly a disinterested observer whose statements
on the matter can be taken as fact; he is one of the book's authors and has an obvious
interest in portraying it as beyond factual reproach. Had Hearn spent a moment looking
into the matter before simply repeating the author's defense of his book as fact, she
would have known that
Gerth was not
telling the truth. (Not only was Gerth's claim -- repeated by Hearn as independent
fact -- that the Clinton camp hasn't challenged anything in the book false, it is largely
irrelevant. In assessing the book's credibility, it matters far less whether the Clinton
camp has pointed out flaws than whether anyone has pointed out flaws. And Media
Matters, among others, has done so,
repeatedly.)
But what makes the Tucker segment noteworthy is
not that it featured false, misleading, and oversimplified
claims about a prominent progressive -- that happens all the
time on cable news. What really makes it noteworthy is that at the end of the
segment -- a segment in which three journalists had discussed at length an allegation
against Hillary Clinton that appeared, based on a single anonymous source describing a
14-year-old event, in a factually flawed book that at least two of the three had not read
-- Carlson and his guests agreed that the media is giving Clinton a pass on the
allegation.
None of the journalists had noted the allegation's
dubious provenance. None noted that Gerth, at least, has a long history of deeply flawed
reporting about the Clintons. Instead, they made false claims (as in Hearn's assertion
that nothing in the book had been contested) and misleading statements (as in Carlson's
description of the authors as "not two guys from The American Spectator. These
are two -- in at least one case, I think, a pretty well-established, at least, former
liberal. I mean, they're not screaming right-wingers") bolstering the credibility of
a book that at least two of them had not read. After this laughable display, in which they
had been manifestly unfair to Hillary Clinton, these three journalists decided that she
was getting off easier than Rudy Giuliani would in a similar situation:
CARLSON: If this were a story about Rudy Giuliani from
1992, it would lead every show on MSNBC today. There's just no question it would. Is that
-- I mean, you know it would. Rudy Giuliani using a police scanner to listen to people's
cell phone calls? Holy smokes, man.
[Hearn nods and smiles]
STODDARD: But, no, no. But it's not clear that she -- it
was her husband's campaign.
CARLSON: Her campaign.
If it was Bernie Kerik working on behalf of Rudy Giuliani
-- I'm not just claiming media bias, it's more complicated than that, but do you -- would
that not be a story?
STODDARD: It might be true. It might be true.
CARLSON: Could he get away with saying --
STODDARD: Well, anything about Bernie Kerik is a story
these days. I mean, to be fair.
Bernie Kerik has been Rudy Giuliani's business partner,
police commissioner, and recommendation to be secretary of homeland security. And Bernie
Kerik is currently
facing
indictment for assorted crookedness. Of course Bernie Kerik is a story -- he and
his ties to Giuliani should probably be more of a story. There is no way in
which Giuliani's relationship with Kerik is analogous to a single anonymous source
claiming that Hillary Clinton listened to a recording in 1992.
Later in the same show, Carlson made another comment
that, while not directly accusing the media of bias, likely led some viewers to conclude
that the media inaccurately portray Republicans as the party of the wealthy. Carlson
claimed to speak a simple truth that "nobody ever, ever mentions":
CARLSON: OK, but here's the fact that nobody ever, ever
mentions -- Democrats win rich people. Over 100,000 in income, you are likely more than
not to vote for Democrats. People never point that out. Rich people vote liberal. I don't
know what that's all about.
The reason that "people never point that out"
probably has something to do with not wanting to be thought of as a fool or a liar.
Carlson's claim that people making more than $100,000 a year tend to vote for Democrats is
simply
false.
In the 2006 congressional elections, Republican
candidates won among those making at least $100,000; they won by an even larger margin
among those making more than $200,000. The same was true in the 2004 presidential
election, the 2004 congressional elections, and the 2000 presidential elections (exit poll
data are not available for the 2002 elections, but it's a safe bet that the pattern held,
particularly given that Republicans did better overall in the 2002 elections than in any
of the others).
Tucker Carlson's entire job is covering politics
and has been for years. It would be bad enough if Carlson simply didn't know something so
basic about contemporary American politics as the fact that people who make at least
$100,000 tend to vote for Republicans. But it's worse than that: He actively believes
(unless he is simply being dishonest) the opposite; so much so, that he takes others to
task for not joining him in spreading his false claims. And not just once -- he made the
same claim in July:
CARLSON: I think this is a longer-term trend that has
been unnoticed by a lot of people. I'll never forget that in 2000, exit polls showed that
Al Gore won the over-$100,000 income bracket. Rich people are liberal. Rich people vote Democratic.
There's this hangover from the 1930s that the Democratic Party is the working man's party.
No, it's the party of Silicon Valley. It's the party of rich people. It's the party of the
poor and of the rich.
In fact, 2000 exit polls show that only 43 percent of
"the over-$100,000 income bracket" voted for Al Gore; 54 percent voted for
George W. Bush. That was the income range Gore
lost
by the largest margin -- but Carlson will "never forget" that Gore won it!
Carlson
recently wondered
why he should listen to Media Matters. The answer is simple: because he doesn't
have any idea what he is talking about and would be well-advised to listen to people who
do, even if he doesn't share their ideology. |