Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson argued the mainstream media’s last gasp for survival was coming in the form of censorship to maintain its “monopoly” and that it was using Big Tech to make it possible.
Carlson explained how media outlets, including CNN, were still obsessed with former President Donald Trump even though he is nine months out of office, and their TV ratings were suffering because of it.
Rather than adapt, Carlson said media companies were determined to eliminate the competitors.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: About 20 minutes into the 2016 presidential campaign, it was pretty clear the American media were horribly addicted to Donald Trump. They hated Trump, obviously, but they also needed Trump in order to live, and that’s the face of addiction.
If you’ve ever seen a person grimace while gulping warm vodka before breakfast with shaky hands, you know what it looks like.
So there was really never any question about what was going to happen for sure when news organizations were finally cut off from their vital daily supply of Donald Trump. They were going to collapse in a pile and that’s exactly what they’ve done, they’ve collapsed.
On Tuesday for example, not a single show on CNN, once the most important cable news channel in the world — “This is CNN” — not a single show on the whole channel approached even 800,000 viewers, that’s really low. Chris Cuomo would be better off doing free concerts in the park, which in fact he may soon be doing.
So with Trump gone, the old formula no longer works. That’s easy to understand.
What’s more confusing, harder to understand is how they’ve responded to this fact? So, let’s say you’ve made billions of dollars over the years selling rice crispy treats to a hungry public, dentists may have complained about what you were doing, but for you it was always a great business and you assumed it would go on forever because we always think everything good will go on forever, but it doesn’t.
Over time, consumers started to figure out that a marshmallow coated with breakfast cereal, not a very healthy food option. It tastes great at first, eat enough, and it starts to make you feel sick.
So they began to buy less of what you were selling. Following this?
How would you react to that? Well, if you were smart you’d probably just rebrand, you’d change the color, you’d throw in some vitamin additives, you’d rename the product. You might call it crunchy kale treats or healthy life nutrition bars. You’d have figured out that people don’t want sugary garbage, they want something that’s good for them, so you would sell it to them. That seems like a pretty rational choice.
What you probably wouldn’t do if you were selling rice crispy treats to a rapidly shrinking market is convince yourself that you are not in the snack food business, but instead on some kind of mission from God. You would not claim that eating marshmallows is a vital moral imperative. You would not attack your own consumers for preferring something else.
You would not denounce them as morons or racists for eating less sugar. You wouldn’t try and ban the Atkins Diet to make keto illegal. That’d be insane, you’d go bankrupt if you did that.
And yet that’s exactly what the legacy media have decided to do as they face extinction. They’ve amped up the moral outrage. They’ve turned the self-righteousness all the way up to 11, and above all, they pretended that nothing has changed and that Donald J. Trump still strides the horizon as a great orange colossus who threatens the very existence of this fragile nation.
We’re not overstating it. Here’s a recent sample of cable news coverage in this country, and keep in mind as you watch, every one of these clips was recorded this week.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Election officials are growing more fearful for their lives as Donald Trump continues his big lie.
POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump continues to push lies about the election, about election results across the country.
DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Where would — where would we be today if the Trump White House simply listened to the science?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Trump wants to overturn the next election. He wants to overturn the last one. He wants to disagree. He wants to limit voting and overturn elections at the state level.
JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy denounced the insurrection, denounced Donald Trump.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump has found a surprising new platform to spread the big lie.
MOLLY JONG-FAST, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, “THE DAILY BEAST”: I mean the thing with Trump is Trump is always bad for democracy.
ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: It has metastasized much far beyond President Trump, right, from multiple sources. I hear you there. However, the original cancer was President Trump.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: What a freak show. No wonder nobody watches. Who would watch that? But listen to what they’re saying. Trump wants to overturn the next election, screams the pudgy midget. They all do.
Okay, got it.
But the fact is that Donald Trump is no longer the President of the United States. He is golfing right now in Florida. Good for him.
How about covering what’s happening in America right now? Ton of change. Maybe you could explain it to us or even tell us about it. Nope. They refuse. And they refuse because they are caught in an earlier age. They can’t adjust to a new reality. It’s depressing when you think about it. That’s going to be all of us someday.
It’s certainly very sad for them. Just a few years ago, hosting a Sunday show on television was considered a very big deal especially in Washington. Now, nobody cares. It’s irrelevant.
Imagine if you’re the host of one of those shows, Chuck Todd doesn’t need to imagine. He is the host of one of those shows. He spent his entire life trying to get this gig, only to discover once he got it that it’s not worth having. No wonder he seems so bitter and fragile.
Here he is earlier this year.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. RON JOHNSON (R-WI): This was started when the mainstream media stopped — dropped any pretense of being unbiased and actually chose sides during this election. This fire was started when you completely ignored for example our investigation of Hunter Biden.
You know, no evidence of wrongdoing there and now we find out after the election, no, there is a fair amount of evidence to the point that we have a real F.B.I. investigation.
CHUCK TODD, NBC NEWS HOST: Senator, all right. I’ve had enough of hearing this.
JOHNSON: It’s the — no, listen, I’ve had enough of this, too.
TODD: Senator, it is — you have spent the last two years —
JOHNSON: You have created a situation where Republicans and conservatives do not trust the mainstream media and that is what has destroyed the credibility of the media and our institutions and really shaken the confidence in this election result.
TODD: Right. No, the destruction of the institution —
JOHNSON: So, I didn’t start this.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Senator, I’ve had enough. Chuck Todd literally can’t even bear to listen to someone criticize the American news media. Oh, but he has to now. Settle down, Chuck. No one is interested in what you think anymore. Your moral authority is long gone, along with your relevance. You’re shouting into the void. They all are.
Deep down, Chuck Todd knows that. They all know that, but rather than accept the truth about themselves and their careers, rather than change their behavior or acquire brand new skills — that’d be nice — or gracefully retired to Cabo, again this is coming for all of us, they won’t. They have one final hope for keeping their scam alive and it’s censorship.
So the dying media companies have convinced themselves that somehow they can get the government and their friends, the tech monopolies, to shut down their competitors, maybe they can keep it going. Maybe they’ll be important and lucrative businesses again. Maybe we can return to 2003, a time when people delayed their golf games to watch “Meet the Press.” Wouldn’t that be great?
That’s their goal, deluded as it is, and it explains why all of a sudden, journalists of all people are leading the charge against the First Amendment that you thought made their jobs possible. This tells you exactly why they hate FOX News so obsessively, and “Substack,” too. This is the key to their campaign against what they call misinformation.
Now, if you’re a literal-minded person and we certainly are, you’d laugh every time you hear them say that. Misinformation? Aren’t these the exact same people who told us that Putin got Trump elected? The ones who swore that some high school kid from Kentucky was in the Klan? Yes, same people.
So of course they’re not against misinformation, obviously. The point is, they want to restore their monopoly on it and that’s what they’re trying to do.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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