NY Times’ Hit Piece on Tucker: Journalistic Malpractice
What a slimy leftist smear job looks like.
By Joseph Klein
The New York Times has been running a three-part hit piece, entitled “American Nationalist,” which smears Tucker Carlson, the host of Fox News’ top rated cable prime time show Tucker Carlson Tonight. The author is Nick Confessore, a New York Times “reporter” who has also contributed to such leftist outlets as MSNBC and The American Prospect.
The title of the first installment is “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable.” The New York Times’ May 1st print edition featured this diatribe on its front page, which spilled over to fill six more pages inside its first section. So much for the Times’ vaunted motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
Confessore claims that Tucker Carlson’s weeknight show “may be the most racist program in the history of cable news.” Citing interviews with anonymous sources and using what he claims was “our content analysis of 1,150 episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Confessore is hiding behind his “reporter” façade to insist that he is not offering “an opinion or a take. It’s a fact.”
Confessore has written anything but a factual account. The New York Times “reporter” has committed journalistic malpractice by using cherry-picked Carlson quotes taken out of context and omitting statements by Carlson altogether that contradict Confessore’s false premise.
Indeed, Nick Confessore has played the race card, superimposing his own left-wing biases in trying to explain why Carlson has moved, in Confessore’s words, “toward the summit of cable news.”
If Confessore were an honest reporter, he might have at least acknowledged that the left-wing cable station for which he himself is a contributor, MSNBC, has a racism problem of its own. That would include the anti-white racist comments by Joy Reid, Confessore’s colleague at MSNBC.
Also, while Confessore insinuates that Fox News has deliberately pitched programming with racist dog whistles to appeal to a predominantly white audience, he neglects to mention that his MSNBC cable news network is not far behind Fox News in white viewership. According to data reported by Public Opinion Strategies, white Americans accounted for 74% of Fox News’ total viewership based on 2020 data while MSNBC was not far behind at 70%. Evidently, Confessore wants his readers to believe that Fox News’ white audience are racists while MSNBC’s white audience must be totally virtuous and bias-free.
Confessore has lived in the elite media bubble for so long that he simply does not get why Tucker Carlson’s audience has grown so rapidly – or he knows but dares not say. The truth is that Carlson’s viewers are tired of being falsely branded as “racists,” “bigots,” “transphobes,” etc. for taking exception to radical left-wing dogmas that defy their core values and common sense. Carlson has been able to successfully tap into that angst.
If Carlson is a “racist,” as Confessore alleges, then the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., whom Carlson has frequently quoted, was also a racist by today’s upside-down standards.
Commenting on the racist accusation against him, Carlson said: “Our view of race is really simple. We believe Martin Luther King. We don’t think your skin color is the most important thing about you. We think all people were created by God and should therefore be judged by what they do, not by how they look. We say that a lot and we mean it. Most Americans strongly agree with that.”
Tucker Carlson has referenced Martin Luther King Jr. many times on his show. In particular, he has quoted from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which the civil rights leader delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” Dr. King declared that day.
In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King also warned against “a distrust of all white people.” He said, “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”
Dr. King criticized the United States for not living up so far to the promise of its founding ideal of equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence, but he never gave up on his country.
Today’s so-called “anti-racists,” who complain about “white privilege” and promote Critical Race Theory, believe that white people are inherently racist. These “anti-racists” also believe that America is irredeemably evil because, they claim, it is built and continues to thrive upon the foundation of slavery. The divisive rhetoric in which these merchants of racial hatred regularly traffic is antithetical to Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachings.
The self-anointed “anti-racists” of today, and those who support them in progressive circles, are the real racial supremacists, not Tucker Carlson.
“Some white people are privileged, some aren’t,” Carlson said. “Some black people are, some aren’t. It’s strikes me as, by definition, a racist attack in that it’s making a generalization – a negative one – based on skin color.”
That is not the sentiment of a white supremacist. Most Americans, not just Tucker Carlson’s audience, would agree that making a generalization – stereotyping – based on skin color is racist. But evidently not Nick Confessore and the editors at the New York Times who decided to run his series on Carlson, accusing him of hosting what “may be the most racist program in the history of cable news.”
Nick Confessore has also written about what he claims are Carlson’s white nationalist anti-immigrant views. Again, Confessore has heavily slanted his articles in an effort to portray Carlson and Fox News in general in the worst possible light.
Fox News has not buried the truth about illegal immigrants flooding across the U.S.-Mexican border in record numbers, as CNN, MSNBC, and other left-wing media outlets have done. Nor has it made excuses for the Biden administration’s colossal failure in managing the worsening crisis at the border.
Telling the truth is not anti-immigrant.
Confessore thinks it is racist for Carlson and other Fox News commentators to express their concerns about the impact that so many unvetted illegal immigrants may have on the communities across the country where they go to live after their release. It may be years before their immigration hearings are conducted, assuming they show up at all.
Is it racist to question how these communities will be able to deal with more crimes committed by some illegal immigrants, on top of already rising crime rates? Is it racist to wonder at loud how these communities will cope with the deadly overdoses caused by fentanyl smuggled across the border? Do only white nationalists speak about the increased burdens placed on the communities’ public education and health systems that in some cases are already teetering on the edge?
Even the New York Times reported earlier this year that Hispanic voters in Democrat strongholds along the border are moving towards the Republican Party because they resent all the attention being paid to illegal immigrants at their expense.
“Our parents came in a certain way — they came in and worked, they became citizens and didn’t ask for anything,” the Times article quoted Ramiro Gonzalez Jr., a 48-year-old rancher from a town on the northern edge of the Rio Grande Valley, as saying. “We were raised hard-core Democrats, but today Democrats want to give everything away.”
“The people coming now seem to be less willing to work and are more dangerous compared to how it used to be,” said Pastor Luis Cabrera, whose parents fled real persecution they were facing in their home country of Nicaragua, according to the New York Times article. “I’m not saying all of them, but trust me, there’s a lot of people who are crossing this border and they don’t care about this country. They want to just commit crime. They want to just come make money the wrong way. They don’t want the American dream.”
Another Hispanic American said, “I worry about where we’re headed, about what will and won’t be allowed. I worry about our values.”
These quotes did not come out of Tucker Carlson’s mouth. They were not the utterances of anti-immigrant white nationalists. Hispanic Americans said them.
Did Nick Confessore even bother to read this New York Times article or research what is bothering some Hispanic Americans about illegal immigration? Obviously not. It would have interfered with his narrative that extremist white nationalists, egged on by Carlson and other Fox News commentators, are the main forces opposing the Biden administration’s open border immigration policies.
The author of the New York Times hit piece on Tucker Carlson has no interest in reporting facts. His articles are certainly not genuine, unbiased news stories that are anywhere near being “fit to print.” But the New York Times chose to run them anyway.
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