On Tucker Carlson, Broken Clocks, and Media Strategy

When Fox News founder Roger Ailes passed away in 2017, I wrote a piece called "Roger Ailes and the Eristic Revival." That piece made three main points: 

1. Fox News did not originate but did magnify the worst tendencies of post-World War II news media in the United States.
2. The real significance of Fox is its revival of the ancient “eristic,” an intoxicating mode of argument rooted not in the civil exchange of ideas for the purpose of arriving at sound public policy, but in the desire to defeat and humiliate opponents.
3. The end and tragic result of Fox’s magnification of the news media’s worst tendencies and revival of the eristic has been the death of political conservatism as a force for generating new ideas or reformulating old ones.

Fox's recent termination of its most popular pundit, Tucker Carlson, gives us another opportunity to opine about the network. With the possible exceptions of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, no one exemplified the Fox formula as well as Carlson. That formula, summarized aptly some years ago by NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen as "resentment news," shows no signs of going away at Fox even though it was at the root of the shoddy "journalism" that cost the network $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems. Though released text messages and emails show conclusively that Carlson knew the Trump alternative universe claims about election fraud were utter bullshit, he continued to amplify MAGA conspiracies and resentments on air because "our viewers are good people and they believe it." When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact checked a Trump tweet alleging voter fraud and concluded the Trump claim was inaccurate, Carlson texted Hannity and Laura Ingraham: 

“Please get her fired . . . It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Why did Fox's stock price go up during the Carlson years? A New York Times analysis of over 1,100 Tucker episodes found an "apocalyptic" world view featuring a fear instilling narrative of "they" want to control "you." "They" are the "ruling class," invoked in over 800 shows the Times analyzed from 2016-2021. It's an intoxicating narrative, one that has deep roots in what historian Richard Hofstadter famously called the "paranoid style" in American politics.  As noted in the Times analysis, Carlson "often begins segments with a grain of truth or an accurately quoted study, but then he distorts a concept to fit his narrative." Apocalyptic rhetoric made Tucker the most watched pundit on cable television. 

That Tucker Carlson uttered an occasional "grain of truth" and often mocked the mainstream punditocracy made it tempting for some with small-d democratic leanings to want to see him as something other than a white supremacist enabler. As noted by Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein in the American Prospect, some of Carlson's sensible populist rants reflected views not stated or emphasized on nightly news shows that reject toxic nativism. Thus, Carlson's show would be literally the only place on cable to hear such views. 

For example, since making his populist turn Carlson regularly says things that used to be associated with the political left, such as: "Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite.” In 2019 he even ended up endorsing Elizabeth Warren's economic policies, telling his mostly MAGA audience that the Massachusetts Senator's critique of multinational corporations was a message abandoned by the mainstream Republican party and reflected "Trump at his best." MSNBC and CNN certainly have talking heads sympathetic to the political left, but it's more of a political left as it exists within the Democratic Party. 

Carlson's populist persona even allows him to take on the National Security State, something that during the George W. Bush years was the province of mainstream Democrats. Pseudo-left, libertarian substackers and podcasters like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Briahna Joy Gray, and Jimmy Dore--all of whom make sensible critiques of how cozy mainstream media have become with security state officials--are all persona non grata at CNN and MSNBC even though their takes on the CIA/NSA/FBI attempts to infiltrate the public sphere were once common in so-called left circles. Carlson had Dore on to say something that is no longer uttered on those networks friendly to Democrats: “Your enemy is not China. Your enemy is not Russia. Your enemy is the military-industrial complex.” Even if we agree, as most people do, that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is illegal and cannot be justified on any moral grounds, do we REALLY believe that Russia is a bigger threat than the military-industrial-complex? The fact that the Russia-Ukraine war is being used by the national security state to resuscitate the images of people who gave us debacles in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places is distressing. And it's absolutely pathetic that a resentment merchant like Tucker Carlson is one of the few pundits with high visibility willing to call that out. 

Tucker Carlson is not going away any time soon, and even without the backing of Fox he will continue to command a large audience. What does that mean? Should people genuinely concerned about the abuses inflicted on society by market capitalism, or worried about the national security state inching us ever closer to World War III, or bothered by government censorship--should anyone taken with those and other issues that so-called progressives used to be outspoken about give kudos to Tucker and share his videos when he espouses a sane position? Assuming Tucker reemerges with a program on which he will have guests, should people who genuinely believe in progressive causes ever appear on his show? 

The short answer is, "it depends." It is true that when Tucker Carlson says something sane, just as when Donald Trump says something sane, the most logical response is that old quote dating back to the1700s:"Even a broken clock is right twice a day." I can certainly understand the school of thought that says appearing on Tucker or sharing his rhetoric, even if it is to promote a good cause, ends up providing cover for his brand of resentment politics. 

On the other hand, I think Nathan Robinson in 2022 made a good point that an authentic left movement should be "ruthlessly strategic" on such matters. Robinson used the example of Chris Smalls of the Amazon Labor Union, who took much criticism from the online left for appearing on Tucker even though his appearance probably reached a significant number of Amazon warehouse workers who share his critique of the corporation. As argued by Robinson: 

Carlson is indeed a truly loathsome individual, who uses white nationalist rhetoric and tries to scare white people into fearing “gypsies” and other immigrants. But in believing that Carlson’s loathsomeness should automatically preclude speaking on his show, we see a lack of attention to the kind of strategic thinking that differentiates what we might call “union organizer mentality” from “media critic mentality.” I am sure Chris Smalls is aware that Tucker Carlson and Fox News are the enemy—Smalls is a revolutionary labor organizer. The value of appearing on Fox is instrumental: there are Amazon warehouse workers who watch Fox News and listen to Tucker Carlson . . . For Smalls, the question of whether to go on Fox News is: “What does it do for the ALU?” It is not “Is Tucker Carlson a good or bad person who deserves credibility?” In other words, Smalls’ choices are outcome-driven rather than an expression of moral preferences. 

Carlson may be the ultimate broken clock, but if in his post-Fox career he continues to command large audiences, then critics of the market, labor organizers and critics of the national security state need to be reflective about the consequences of appearing or NOT appearing on his program. People on the political left--whether they call themselves liberals, radicals, progressives, or whatever--should be very angry with a mainstream "liberal" media that forces this kind of strategizing. How is it possible that critiques of capitalism, rejection of the apparatchiks who gave us Iraq and Afghanistan, and critique of the military-industrial complex are more welcome on Tucker than on traditional "liberal" platforms? It's long past time for the so-called media left to reclaim those positions so that a resentment based broken clock like Tucker Carlson cannot continue to use those positions as a shield to cover for his overall apocalyptic world view. 

Love For All, Hatred For None

[Note: The Ahmadiya Muslim Community in Oshkosh invited Mayor Lori Palmeri and other distinguished Fox Valley leaders to speak at their 2023 Iftar. Mayor Palmeri could not make it, and she asked me to attend in her place. The Ahmadiya leaders graciously asked me to say a few words. Below is a transcript of my remarks.]

My name is Tony Palmeri. I’m a professor of Communication Studies at UW Oshkosh and former  member of the Oshkosh Common Council.

My spouse Lori Palmeri is the Mayor of Oshkosh, and she was recently elected as the Representative in the State Assembly for this 54^th District.

Unfortunately, she could not be here tonight due to a prior commitment—she is at an event honoring firefighters in our community. Her term as Mayor ends on April 18^th, and she will not be returning to that position. She asked me to remind you to vote for a new mayor and council on April 4^th!

Mayor Palmeri sends her greetings. She wants me to tell you that she has always respected and admired the Adhmadiya Muslim community, and her respect and admiration has grown in her four years as Mayor.

She is especially appreciative of your spirit of openness and tolerance, of your support for the city’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and your deep commitment to the values of family, community, and civic engagement.

Most of all, Mayor Palmeri has been moved by your profound and simple message: Love For All, Hatred For None.

The Mayor and I try to live that message, but like all human beings we sometimes fall short. We all fall short at times, don’t we? In a world filled with so much negativity, with so many bad faith actors trying to keep us divided, it is sometimes difficult to remember that we must always have love for all and hatred for none, even when there is so much pressure moving us off that path.

In Oshkosh we are blessed to have YOU to remind us of that profound and simple message. Love for all, hatred for none.

And you have had impact. Allow me to share with you just one example. In 2010 I was on the Oshkosh City Council. That was the year the city received your request to turn this building into a house of worship.

When your request became public, members of the City  Council started receiving phone calls, emails, and other communications. Much of it expressed concerns about noise and traffic congestion and other things that were sincere and certainly not trivial, but did seem exaggerated.

As I started communicating with people who were expressing concerns, it became clear to me that what we were at least in part dealing with was a fear of Islam, which was not surprising given the political climate of that time and the mostly irresponsible media coverage of Muslim people in the first decade of the 21^st century.

As the date of the vote on your request got closer, much of the communication the council was receiving got more angry, and some of it had a bullying or threatening tone. One person approached me in the grocery store and said “if you vote for the mosque I will never vote for you again.” I know some of my colleagues on the council received similar communications.

But your demeanor in those days inspired me.

Even though your motives were being questioned, you did not respond with anger even though it would have been understandable had you done so.

You had the facts and the law on your side but did not immediately threaten lawsuits, even though it would have been understandable had you done so.

You did not refuse to meet with anyone, including people making irrational statements, even though it would have been understandable had you done so.

Instead, you went out of your way to address every concern and to accommodate concerns in whatever way possible.

No matter what was thrown in your direction, no matter what obstacles were placed in your path, you responded with love for all, and hatred for none.

So, in 2010 in our own little corner of the world, right here in Oshkosh, we had a contest between fear and love.

And love won.

Love won.

I believe Love can and must win at the global level. The peace and security that we all seek is not possible without love.

But the victory of love is not inevitable.

We must act. We must act.

For love to win we must practice what political theorist Danielle Allen and others call political friendship. Political friendship is not a shallow display of civility.

Political friendship means treating all human beings, even strangers, as we treat our closest friends. With our closest friends we act in good faith, we listen, we take turns, we compromise, we problem solve, and most importantly we sacrifice individual preferences for the greater good.

If we can practice that kind of friendship with ALL human beings, then love will win. And we can have the peace and security we crave.

I want to close by thanking you for the friendship you have shown Mayor Palmeri and me, and for the friendship you’ve shown the entire community,

Representative Palmeri wants Oshkosh and Wisconsin to be known as places that stand for love for all and hatred for none. She looks forward to partnering with you to make that happen.

Thank you. 

Media Should Call Out Xenophobic Showboating

American leaders should never minimize, make excuses for, or enable human rights abuses around the world--no matter where such abuses occur, and no matter if a nation committing abuses is a "strategic partner" of the United States. That includes China, whose human rights abuses are well documented. 

Unfortunately, more often than not American leaders' critiques of foreign governments are hypocritical, self-serving, mindless, and ignorant. This is especially true when the critiques are bipartisan. Post-World War II, bipartisan agreement on the evil of a foreign adversary is typically a grotesque form of groupthink benefiting not the cause of freedom as much as bottom line military-industrial-complex interests. When foreign policy stupidity reigns in Washington, we should remind ourselves of George Washington's Farewell Address admonition to "guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." 

The new Cold War with China is bipartisan; Wisconsin Republican congressman Mike Gallagher (right) and Illinois Democratic congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi lead the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Gallagher seeks "ideological warfare" with China, which he claims is a "lost art." 

The new bipartisan Cold War with China does not feature a morally upright United States Congress standing tall for global democracy and human rights. Rather, this Cold War is primarily an inane and paranoid theater of the absurd in which lightweight congressmen from safely gerrymandered districts think they are sounding tough when they "boldly" call for a Tik Tok ban. Remember, these were the same characters (especially the Republicans), who told us during election time they were going to be "laser focused" on inflation and jobs. Most of them worry about the Chinese Communist Party using nefarious digital means to dumb down our youth and undermine the future of democracy. But the same people either minimize or have nothing to say about an actual attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021. 

One of the main offenders in the New Cold War era is Wisconsin congressman Mike Gallagher. The new Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, whose name appropriately enough is "McCarthy," appointed Gallagher as Chair of the "Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party." If you had a dime for every time Gallagher says "Chinese Communist Party," you would be quite rich. Gallagher refers to "ideological warfare" as a "lost art" and longs for a return to the Reagan era with big military budgets backed up by black v. white views of the world. (Note: We are already approaching a trillion dollar a year defense budget.). At a time when the United States and China should be working together on climate mitigation initiatives, poverty eradication, helping to negotiate peace in the Russia v. Ukraine war, and other initiatives that might actually benefit humanity at-large, our new Cold Warriors are getting us prepared for a new arms race. 

Gallagher opposes President Biden's budget because it fails to (you guessed it) "combat the threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party." He's upset that the budget allegedly "increases spending on domestic progressive priorities at more than double the rate of defense . . . and shortchanges the Pentagon at the worst moment possible." At the same time, he introduced a bill to "ban Biden from cancelling student loans." 

While Gallagher's Select Committee on China called to mind the worst of the red-baiting Congressional excesses of the 1950s, for pure comedy it was no match for a recent hearing held by the Energy and Commerce Committee. Chaired by Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, the hearing was called "Tik Tok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children From Online Harms." Listening to and watching the hearing, you would think that Tik Tok is uniquely awful in the big tech world, or that surveillance of private data is something invented by the Chinese Communist Party. As noted media law scholar (and my former student) Chris Terry might say, "I know journalism is hard," but someone should ask Edward Snowden if the Chinese Communist Party invented private data surveillance. 

The most hysterical part of the hearing, in a pathetic way, was congressman Dan Crenshaw's (R-Texas) questioning of Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew. Crenshaw's comments, like so many of his colleagues that day on both sides of the aisle, represented what digital rights activist Evan Greer calls "Xenophobic Showboating." Crenshaw started off his remarks by sarcastically thanking Chew for "bringing Democrats and Republicans together." At one point Crenshaw clearly was trying to "own" Chew by pointing out that under China's 2017 national intelligence law, Chinese citizens must cooperate with Chinese intelligence and are bound to secrecy. Chew interrupted to say, "Congressman, first, "I'm a Singaporean." Did Crenshaw know that Chew was from Singapore? I don't think he did, and he tried to cover it up by suggesting that it did not matter. Crenshaw closed with a paranoid rant about Tik Tok being part of a Chinese Communist Party conspiracy to weaken America from within, through controlling our youth. A full transcript of this mostly shameful hearing can be found here. 

Only a handful of members of congress, including Wisconsin's Mark Pocan and New York's Jamaal Bowman, had anything rational to say about Tik Tok. They rightly condemned the "hysteria" over Tik Tok, and argued--correctly in my view--that discussions about the platform should be placed in a larger context of data manipulation by Big Tech in general. These points are reinforced by investigative journalist Julia Angwin: 

But when you dig into the national security allegations against TikTok, it is telling that most of the charges could just as easily be levied against the U.S. tech giants. And most of the tech companies’ exploitation of data has not been curbed by the government . . . [Yet]securing data from internal threats has been a problem for all the Big Tech companies. Google has fired dozens of employees for data misuse, including obtaining user data. Microsoft admitted to snooping in a blogger’s Hotmail account to see who was leaking internal documents. At Twitter, internal controls were so lax that an ex-employee was convicted of using his access to spy on Saudi dissidents, and a whistle-blower said that the company had hired an employee in India who had used his access to spy on Indian dissidents.

Evan Greer argues that the red scare is no substitute for better data privacy laws:  “TikTok uses the exact same surveillance capitalist business model of services like YouTube and Instagram. Yes, it’s concerning that the Chinese government could abuse data that TikTok collects. But even if TikTok were banned, they could access much of the same data simply by purchasing it from data brokers, because there are almost no laws in place to prevent that kind of abuse. If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone.”

What is the role of big media in the New Bipartisan Cold War? Not surprisingly, but still tragically, big media are allowing xenophobic nonsense to be put forth as a legitimate political position. What we need from big media (and from all media, actually) is an independent spirit that calls out human rights abuses on all sides, and refuses to be the stage on which xenophobic showboating performs. As I've written about before, during the McCarthy period of red baiting in the 1950s, only a small group of journalists and commentators (especially Edward Murrow of CBS, Bill Evjue of the Madison Capital Times, and independent journalist George Seldes) had the backbone to take on McCarthy and his enablers throughout the government. We need a new generation of principled journalists and commentators to do the same today.