Chris Hayes: The Tucker Carlson villain origin story

But of the many truths about right-wing media that these Dominion documents have laid bare, one stands out as particularly informative about the way the entire ecosystem works; It's something that a lot of people haven't grasped, but take a second because there is almost a fundamental asymmetry between traditional media outlets that care about the accuracy of factual reporting and conservative media outlets like Fox that only tell their audience what what they want here and there. There are two examples from these latest submissions that I think highlight the disparity really being first and foremost in an email from a Senior Executive Producer on Tucker Carlson's show who is forwarding a clip from none other than NBC News correspondent Steve Kornacki , at the big board discussing the election results in Arizona.

He quotes this explanation from Cornacky in Ms. It's worth watching and my reaction upon reading was yes. Is he very good at explaining things despite all his lies about the so-called liberal fake news media when the cameras are turned away when they talk privately? Fox News producers understand that what Steve Kornacki says is trustworthy, it is not propaganda, it is not a farce. is trying to get to the facts in good faith and the second example is similar, it's from that strange period right after the election, we were all waiting for the 2020 results to finish coming in, we didn't know what was going to happen, the president of Fox Business sends another executive quote the president responds citing full disclosure the last article I read was a New York Times article LOL which in turn prompts a quote ha well I love this exchange that's the full

story

forget all the Dominion stuff, forget about uh, you know, all the private stuff. back and forth new side shots this is this this is just in a handle the executives are clearly a little embarrassed to quote their sworn nemesis New York Times in their opinion, the media that most represents the biased inferior media, on the other hand, They need reliable information about the election results to do their job and fundamentally they understand that that is what the New York Times does and it does it quite well because there is no right-wing alternative to the New York Times and about 15 years ago there was someone who very identified shrewdly this asymmetry someone who knew that the political far right did not have their own rigorous journalistic institutions that could simply produce reliable and trustworthy information for the people and was someone who wanted to solve that problem by creating a news organization whose main objective is If not you deliver accurate news, you will fail, you will fail, the New York Times is a liberal newspaper, but it is also, and is at its core, a liberal newspaper that cares about whether they spell people's names correctly in general, it is a newspaper who actually cares about accuracy conservatives need to build institutions that reflect those institutions that are that's the truth don't believe me the New York Times don't believe that alcohol alcohol now I vehemently disagree with Tucker's assessment of bias Carlson at the New York Times, is not a liberal newspaper, although his point that the political right lacks credible journalism is well taken, that video of right there Tucker being booed at CPAC for having the temerity to speak this obvious truth could very well be his

villain

's

origin

story

, you see.

He had just emerged from a series of professional humiliations, his second cable news show on as many networks had recently been canceled, so Carson was looking to start a new venture. His big project at the time he was launching was a new website called The Daily Caller. was going to be his conservative response to the New York Times the kind of project he had tried to soft-launch at CPAC a year earlier spoiler alert didn't work out as Alex Shepard writes Republic's new quote when he launched the Daily Caller in 2010 Carlson promised it would be primarily A news site with a simple approach to news, find out what's happening and tell it to you.

We plan to be precise in both the facts we state and the conclusions we imply that there was no hearing in a few. months he was publishing fake news an outraged comment the transformation The Daily Caller is the Rosetta Stone moment in Carlson's career a period during which he learned his lesson he never sought respectability again in retrospect that CPAC speech he heard a moment ago was a foreshadowing of what was to come and not just about these particular characters in this story, it's about the entire epistemic universe in which almost half the country exists in the audience.

Brewing Tucker getting his bearings suggests that the right should care about accurate news shows how little appetite there was for that. kind of fact-based reporting that Tucker found out where the money was The Daily Caller became virtually indistinguishable from far-right fringe outlets like Breitbart's upcoming TV Venture Carlson became something akin to Alex Jones in Wars on Fox News, but Carlson and his friends at Fox understand more than anything that where their audience is is where their bread is buttered. They can't run a profitable business selling accurate reporting to the right-wing base. At least no one has done it yet.

They don't seem to want it. They don't read it. look at it, there's no money in it, you'll see that understanding on display in all of these presentations, seasoned Fox veterans, even supposedly reputable ones like Brett Bear, positively freaking out about the network calling Arizona for Biden, which they got right, or one of reporters verifying the facts. Trump, when he was lying, don't do that because they understand that they start doing anything other than telling their audience only what they want to hear, their audience will abandon them and I wish we lived in a world that I actually do, where we had basically the That Tucker.

We imagine responsible, fact-based conservative media, there are some small outlets, but we don't have them and that's why when things get bad, when everything is confusing and chaotic in those days after the election, Who are the Fox employees who turn to Steve Kornacki and the New York Times? times thank you