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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Paid to Lie
On the boundless and hugely remunerative cynicism of Rupert Murdoch and
his faux-news fabricators

It was a big week for lying on Fox as well as on other Murdoch
properties. There were hysterics about the entirely imaginary Biden plan

to ban hamburgers, lies

about what John Kerry told the Iranians about Israeli attacks on Syria,
and front-page screaming

headlined stories in the Murdoch-owned New York Post about copies of
Kamala Harris's book allegedly being force fed to migrant children (or
something, in a piece was taken down and then repurposed and edited, a
process that led the reporter, Laura Italiano, who said she was forced
to write it, to quit her job. Shocker: the edited version remained
riddled with falsehoods.)

The term "jumping the shark" dates from a 1977 episode of "Happy
Days" in which Fonzie literally jumped over a shark on water skis

for no apparent reason save that people were growing tired of the same
old whining about girls from Richie and Ralphie.  In its metaphorical
sense, the expression has since come to mean "finally went batshit
crazy after hovering on just this side of sanity for a period of
time." The phrase, you will perhaps not be shocked to read, pops up an
awful lot in Google searches that combined with the words "Fox
News."

The super-smart folks who write Politico's daily Playbook did not
mention sharks when asking earlier this week, "IS TUCKER CARLSON
LOSING HIS MIND
?"
But I'm betting I'm not the only person to whom the phrase also
occurred. The Playbook geniuses admitted "that some people may believe
that Tucker 'lost it long ago.'" (I see the hashtag
"#TuckerCarlsonMustGo
"
trending on twitter and The Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan gets a
little closer to the real issue with a column

titled, "Tucker Carlson's latest idiocy on masks is dangerous and
hypocritical even by his usual standards.") "But as careful
students of his evening show," Politico's Mensa mavens continued,
"we've noticed that Carlson has gradually become more unhinged in
recent weeks." Their reasons: "He's devoted enormous attention to
apologias for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. He seemed noticeably
perturbed the night that Derek Chauvin was found guilty. And under the
banner of just asking questions! he has given quarter to anti-vaxxers
and COVID-19 conspiracists."Here is what, in another context, might be
called Tucker's "money shot," as Politico cites him saying:
"Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should
be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at
Walmart ... Call the police immediately, contact child protective
services. Keep calling until someone arrives."

True, Tucker's rant is both nonsensical and potentially dangerous. But
it is no more evidence of a lost mind than almost anything Tucker has
been saying since he was given the job of replacing Bill O'Reilly
during the 2016 parade of Fox paying tens of millions of dollars to its
impressively deep roster of sexual predatory anchors and executives to
please go away. His masked-child rant followed by just a few days
Carlson's on-air meltdown

when his guest, the former new York City deputy sheriff Ed Gavin,
reacted with common sense to Tucker's leading questions about the
allegedly catastrophic impact on policing and public safety that would,
in his view, follow the verdict in the George Floyd murder trial.  Just
a couple of weeks earlier, the
extremely-indulgent-when-it-comes-right-wingers Anti-Defamation League
had felt compelled to call on Fox to fire Carlson

for his embrace of the "replacement" meme so popular with
anti-Semites, like, for instance, Donald Trump's "very fine people
"
(the guys chanting "Jews will not replace us" in Charlottesville in
2017, amid considerable Nazi regalia).  

"Finally Losing His Mind?" I don' thin so, Lucy. Here

is Media Matters' compilation of white Supremacist language used by
Carlson that dates back to 2006. And that's just one category of
Tuckerisms.

I used to know Tucker a little bit a long time ago; I think we had lunch
when he was working at The Weekly Standard, and we did a debate together
at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2008, which you can
watch, if you are really bored, here
.
You may find this hard to believe, but Tucker was once a quite a good
journalist when he wanted to be. For instance, I almost (!) wish I had
written this terrific Carlson piece
,
(and you won't believe the topic). Tina Brown was right when she told
the Columbia Journalism Review
"Tucker is a
tremendously good writer and I always thought it was a real shame that
he kind of like got sucked into this TV mania thing." Personally, I
cannot believe he is crazy enough to believe the lunacy he regularly
spouts on Fox. What I do believe is that he is cynical enough to keep
wholesaling whatever crazy notions he comes up with if he thinks his
audience will appreciate them.

And so far, he's been right. If his idiot fans who are not in on the
joke start harassing small children-who may be, say, wearing masks
because they have cancer or some other sickness that makes them
especially vulnerable-much less calling the cops on them, well,
that's not Tucker's problem. As the Dominion Voting Systems

demonstrated, you have to sue Fox, or any other Murdoch property, for no
less than a billion dollars to get them to admit the truth after
they've been caught lying about it. As for Tucker, 10 to 20 million
bucks a year makes up for a great deal of what most people would
consider shame, or at least embarrassment.

What Tucker's shameless nuttiness tells us about Fox is that for its
big money men (and women), it is all a con. Tucker, Laura Ingraham, and
many of the other lying racists who specialize in making America
ungovernable by ginning up lies to excite the yahoos know just what they
are doing. I worked with Laura every day during the founding of MSNBC
back the around the time when she was dating Lawrence Summers
and
playing the "reasonable" conservative on TV. CBS News evenpaired her
with Bill Bradley
,
as if the two were both somehow representative of the spectrum of
responsible political opinion. When I worked for the Center for American
Progress, we took her along on a trip-I think to the Aspen Comedy
Festival or else the Sundance Film Festival-and I appeared with her on
a panel sponsored by The New York Times. Laura was not the frothing
racist she plays on TV today, and I'd be surprised if she is in
private either. (I wrote a column about her in 1997, but we have not
spoken in probably 15 years.) She just plays one on TV.

When did Laura start playing the current racist monster version of
herself, spouting evil, destructive nonsense like this
?
I don't know-but I do know it's been awfully profitable. Clearly,
she must find it relatively easy to live with the trade-offs she's
made. After all, when your checkbook, your ratings, your producer, your
make-up person, your personal assistant, your agent, your driver, your
masseuse et al can't stop talking about how smart, brave and hey,
sexy, you are, I imagine it's not so hard to believe it. As a
character in Richard Russo's 2019 novel, Chances Are ..., observes,
"That's the thing about lies, right? Individually, they don't
amount to much. But you never know how many others you'll need to tell
to protect that first one. And damned if they don't add up. Over time
they all get tangled up, until one day you realize it isn't even the
lies themselves that matter, it's that somehow lying has become your
default mode and the person you lie to most is yourself."

One thing that doesn't lie, however, is the Murdoch family balance
sheet. As long as Fox keeps earning its billions of dollars each year,
they're continually confirmed in their belief that the difference
between truth and lies doesn't matter at all; it's all the same to
them. What I want to know is why, in the rest of the media-the people
who not only do not profit from Fox's lies, but are forced to swim in
the waters it pollutes-continue to treat it as a legitimate news
source. We all would be better off if all those old white folks
suffering not from "racism" but from "economic insecurity" spent
their time watching the fifth season of "Happy Days." In the
meantime, journalists should shun the people who are ruining their
profession-and our democracy along with it.

Also, could somebody please give Ms. Italiano a job at a real news
organization?

Odds and Ends

* It's warming up, and I've not seen many major outdoor shows
planned for this summer at places like Tanglewood or Jones Beach that we
can look forward to. In the meantime, snuggle up with a video of a young
James Taylor and Carly Simon singing "You Can Close Your Eyes
."

* Now here's James Taylor with Yo-Yo Ma singing "Here Comes the Sun
."

* Here are James Taylor and Joni Mitchell singing together in 50-minute
performance in Paris in 1970
.

* Here's an audio of Joni with Neil Young singing "Raised on Robbery
."

* Here's an early version of CSNY (really "Y) singing "Birds
" from
Déjà vu (again).

* Finally, here's a delightful Linda Ronstadt singing "Different
Drum
."

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Donate to The American Prospect

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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