Episode 36: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

I went out to buy a white shirt for some reason last week and I put it on and I said, I can't do this. It's just too much of a contrast. I look like Ricardo Montalban in those old, you know, those old Chrysler Cordoba commercials.

So I first noticed this phenomenon with Trump, when you're simply trying to diagnose, why is he doing well, why is he winning in the polls? And you discover that writing about things like, Well, he's criticizing NATO and NATO's unpopular, or he's saying the two parties don't have a whole lot of difference between them. And Jeb Bush isn't that different from Hillary Clinton that this message is scoring?

You found that this was not something that you were allowed to say really in media after a while. And Tucker Carlson kind of embodies this same thing. We had a remarkable incident involving the American prospect, which I'm sure we'll get into this week. But he has become a huge media phenomenon, especially in the last five years, especially during the Trump years. I think a lot of it is because he has taken very canny advantage of the failings and inconsistencies of media. On both sides of the aisle, both the Fox model and the mainstream model.

And he has let go from Fox this week. And it creates a hole in the media landscape that is fascinating to even ponder from lots of different angles. But I'd be curious, what's your first initial response to what happened?

And everyone in media, especially television media, is set to wondering. Because it's not. Because in the case of Don Lemon, who was fired the same day, he's having a lot of problems attracting an audience, he's got one of the biggest audiences in cable news, Tucker did.

Tucker's doing 5x what they are doing, you know, it was funny. My first thought was everyone wanted to make Fox News and Tucker Carlson synonymous, but obviously Fox News didn't feel they were synonymous.

Obviously, Tucker's form of heterodox journalism was bothering them in some fashion, as much as it bothered the people who didn't like Fox News. So what was it that bothered them? That's the first question, why did they do this? Why would a company chop off its lead personality, summarily and without explanation, in a way that causes huge confusion and anger among its audience?

And we saw that during the week. I looked last night at ratings numbers for his time slot.

And you know, we know how TV works, it's all about the audience, gathering an audience and then funneling them into the next show and so on. So, in other words, you're right, it was a big hole for Fox commercially, and but also for journalism in general. Because no matter what you think of Tucker Carlson, there was first of all an ensemble of guests that he had on who don't appear elsewhere in the media. On Greenwald, for example, you know someone who was regularly on Tucker's show and doesn't?

Style media.

He was a guy who was also producing a daily, long form video cast that had all kinds of people. I was on it once. Full disclosure.

And, you know, it was an hour and a half long discussion about literature and the role of the artist in the currently repressive atmosphere. That was a conversation that he did not choreograph. I mean, he asked questions, but there was no sense that I could not say certain things, could say other things. It was completely open ended, I appreciate.

So, you know, as the week wore on, there were all kinds of theories and rumors about what had happened. And they ranged from. Oh, there's a some kind of a harassment lawsuit going on involving an employee who claims a hostile work environment issue. As a booker on his show. And maybe Fox was getting ahead of that. Well, for me, at least, who's watched some of these scandals over the years, that seemed ridiculous. I mean, suits like that are happening constantly at network news and news organizations.

And they usually aren't the reason for someone going away, I mean, especially when. As we learned, the plaintiff had never met Tucker. Carlson, who I happen to know from my own experience, broadcasts remotely from home studios far from New York City.

In any case, since that one didn't wash with me, I wondered if it was true, as Vanity Fair reported, and a couple of other places picked up on that. His recent speeches to places like the Heritage Foundation, in which he professed fairly vividly some religious faith, had somehow offended the powers that be.

That sort of made sense only in that. Often in these stories, there's some weird, bizarre cause that you would never guess. And that seemed weird and bizarre enough to maybe be true. That Rupert Murdoch had had taken offense at Tucker's religiosity and decided he shouldn't be there. But at the same time, if you watch other Fox shows, and I don't often, to be candid, you do see a lot of professions of faith on the air.

One thing that we know is that he has not been released from his contract. The reporting on that seems solid. The guy is still being paid by Fox, he just doesn't have a show, so that seems almost punitive or something.

You keep a person on the payroll, but you just take away their show. What could that be about?

We can speculate, and I've heard various things from some sources, which would seem very good. That there's a relation to the Dominion lawsuit, which I think was probably the original amateur hypothesis by many that this happened at the very same time. Though coincidence is not causation necessarily, it often is in practice.

Well, it often points to something. One of the fundamentals of reporting is that if two things happen at the same time, one should examine whether or not they are related. Here's a huge $800 million lawsuit which Fox settles for reasons, frankly, that aren't entirely clear to me. I mean, they have the ability to not settle any lawsuit if they wish, at least for a long time.

I think Dominion had a good claim, you know, I think, looking at looking at that suit.

You know, there was there was a lot of unsubstantiated stuff that went on on Fox News, and this is we talked about this last week that they.

But speak, maybe to their right, even get things wrong, because journalism must allow itself an opportunity to air. If it's to go on, you know, it can't be rampantly misleading. But at the same time as we've seen with other cable channels, there were errors that went on for years, right? That did not result in giant lawsuits or were giant settlement.

They had a lot of pressure points to look at. And I do think that that what happened with the Dominion case is kind of a classic example of what happens. When you're, you're in this audience optimization model, where you're, you feel you feel trapped by audience demand to hear something right. The same thing that happened, you know, MSNBC, I think.

They followed the trail of stupid Russiagate stories because that was their ticket to the higher ratings for a while. But the weird thing about the Tucker case is that his role in this suit is is apart. Apart from the fact that they got private comments from him talking about how he didn't believe it really, it ends up being that he interviewed Mike Lindell over being banned from Twitter and didn't really press him on certain claims.

I mean, yeah, but I bring this up only to say that there was. There was an initial reaction that maybe Fox was blaming him for the suit, and I don't think that's rational if you read the suit, like, if you read the suit, he's not.

He's not who they're really focused on, and it doesn't seem.

But that just makes everything more mysterious yet.

And so what, you know, what scenarios are we left with? I'm not sure, but the fact is that, you know. To get back to basics. The biggest, most successful cable news channel in the country took arguably its most successful host off the air. Suddenly and in a way that has still not been properly explained. And I can only imagine that they did that in response to some force majeure, you know, some extremely powerful and or urgent.

Need, or or, or desire. It wasn't something that seems like it was brewing as a possibility. It it seems like a kind of unthought out, sudden move which will have terrible consequences for the network prospects and was probably not very well thought out. So, in other words, something happened, something specific, something specific happened, something specific happened recently.

And it, it would seem to me at least, that it has to do with this lawsuit. Probably because that was the elephant in the room at the time.

CARLSON Because he's probably almost solely the reason that they're so, that they were so far ahead in the ratings.

This.

Seem to have come as a big surprise, at least to the Tucker side.

I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that, you know, his leaving might have been a condition, you know, a condition of the settlement. I don't know. Well, I guess, I guess we'll all this stuff will come out, but my sources tell me that.

And it must, I would think, be frustrating if you're Tucker Carlson, and you're still bound in some contractual way to your network.

Endless speculation about what happened between to not be able to say.

And that's the big time, I guess, you know, that that's what happens in the multimillion dollar world journalism.

I saw a fairly shocking article in The Hill that mostly just quoted members of the House, including one who said, Now they just have to take out the rest of the trash. Right, right. And you know, I had that forwarded to me by, you know, somebody who was pointing out that rhetoric reminded him of other rhetoric from other groups.

But.

In the midst of this, there's the there was the caricature version of.

Tucker Carlson that is kind of allowable on mainstream MSNBC style media, CNN style media, Daily Beast style media that Carlson is a he's, he's just another Republican bogeyman, racist.

And there's nothing that differentiates him from any, any of the other people that they, you know, routinely go after. But this, that's just not correct. The interesting thing about Carlson and.

Is the reason why he had even, you know, a million more viewers on average than Sean Hannity? It's because he was off. The product on that show, was different than everything else on Fox, he was venturing into areas of commentary that.

Probably, you would previously say, were forbidden on that, not only on Fox, but on MSNBC and on.

Skeptical about the war and our, our, our, our activities in Ukraine, who was very overtly. I'm upset with the influence of pharmaceutical advertisers during the Covid pandemic. Who also evinced a kind of basically populist set of sympathies. That that were more aligned with, the, you know, the man on the street as it were, than the Washington establishment. And you also had a guy, let's just be kind of human about it, who comes from sort of the upper echelons of Washington journalistic and State Department circles. You know, he has, he has a famous father who was involved with.

State Department and United States Communications Strategies around the world. Who was a reporter himself, I think, and he? He has some personal wealth and was in some ways, a kind of class traitor, to be honest. That's how he read, he read as somebody who who knew the types he was reporting on.

His wife had been friends with Hunter Biden's wife, that there was association between those families. So what he was doing was he was speaking, as if from the inside of the inner circle, about its flaws, about its prejudices, about its tendencies, and its blind spots. So if there was anyone on cable news of any ideological description who was more likely to upset the powers, that be, it was Tucker Carlson.

I mean, what? Only last week, I think we saw people calling for his house.

But you don't have to, you don't have to believe that. Tucker Carlson sincere, that he's really a man of the people, that he's really anti-war, that he really hates the intelligence agencies. You don't have to believe any of that, um, but he presented as these things. Even if you want to say that it's purely a cynical strategy for gaining audience, that is how his show is structured.

It was structured as I'm on your side. These people are a cabal of corrupt functionaries who are anti-democratic, who want to deny your basic rights. Yeah, who does that? Sound like? That? Sounds like a message that we're we're familiar with.

That that's been popular, not just in this country, but around the world in in the last five to, you know, 10 years. But, you know, Donald Trump was the big example of this. Uh, and why does that message? why is that message resonant? It's resonant because a lot of things are true.

The popular media is terrible, it is transparently no longer representative of the audience and adversarial towards government. It is the things that are completely reversed. If you turn on any mainstream television broadcast, you're going to see a string of government officials. They may even be actually reading the news in some cases.

So the orientation of media is openly presenting messaging from the government or from the powers that be at the population, who is expected to absorb and sort of obey it. The orientation of Carlson's show, again, whether you believe it's sincere or not, was this is where you can come to hear the truth about the Evildoers in Washington. And as you say, he's got some experience in that regard, he knows a lot of these people, he knows how a lot of these things work.

Trump had a lot of the same strategies. He also presented himself as a traitor from the Olympus.

But he was, I think, less articulate about this, and he's less of a polished communicator, although he's good in his own right in the role that he's in. But certainly, Carlson's show is different from what you would find on a typical Fox show.

Chuck Schumer One of the guys who just scares the bejesus out of me because whenever he puts the evil eye on someone, seem to go away quickly.

You know, a couple of weeks ago, or a few weeks back, when Carlson was supposedly in possession of the January 6th tape. Promised to show them on his show. Did so for one night, and Schumer came out, said, This is this is treasonous or something. Well, they never showed it again after that night. So I mean, to be really simple about it all. This guy was in the gun sights as it were of of of the Democratic Party, the Pentagon, the intelligence established.

I'm probably a big pharma after some of the things, he said, and a lot of people wanted to see him gone and were quite open about that. You could watch the news in the last few months and and see people saying, Tucker, Carlson needs to go. It's almost the duty of yours, Rupert Murdoch, to get rid of him, and now he has gone. Now. We don't know which, we don't know which instrument of that pressure might have been applied, which specific instrument of pressure.

But we do know that the pressure overall was great and has been great, and.

And there was.

In other words, we're going to return to the paradigm that everybody was comfortable with.