Category: Media

Tucker Carlson pours on the sarcasm in segment goofing on Shep Smith

In a story via my mother who listened to this segment while half-paying-attention and asked me to find it and make sense of it for her because the sarcasm was so dry that it was confusing: Center-Right current Fox News host Tucker Carlson used a short segment on his show to goof on Left-wing former Fox News host Shepherd Smith who left Fox after 24 years there to do a show on CNBC (Fox viewers were increasingly voicing dislike that Shepherd Smith hosted his own hour long show on the center-right network and used that time to attack President Trump so it’s no big surprise that Smith decided he would be more comfortable on another network).

You would think Shepherd might use his new platform to go after Trumpists and Republican abuses of power now that he’s among folks who appreciate that sort of thing a lot more, but in this segment that Tucker highlighted on his show – Shep’s chosen target was… a grocery store in Florida where people weren’t forced to wear masks…

Shepherds choice of coverage is bizarre but so is Tuckers commitment to the deadpan delivery here, so I don’t blame my mom and likely many others who weren’t fully mentally invested in what they were listening to and thus got confused at the bit.

Tucker started saying “Tonight we bring you the story of a genuine investigative journalist,” – with no smile or visual cue to tip the audience that he was being sarcastic – “A man who’s been forgotten. Cast aside like an Acosta when he should be an Edward R. Murrow. That’s an injustice we plan to rectify right now.”

“Last night, this same investigative journalist (now an anchor at CNBC) broke the story of a lifetime. If Pulitzer Prizes still mattered, and they don’t, this would get a Pulitzer”.

Watch it yourself:

I have been cautioning broadcasters to not do this for decades now. Ever since I heard Laura Ingraham on her radio show in 2003 bolster an argument about CNN’s left wing bias by adding “but at least they have Larry King – that staunch conservative” in a tone of sarcasm that I was positive at least half of her audience didn’t understand, because it made me double-take it myself to compute “huh? Larry King is a center-Left Democrat th–oh… that’s what she was highlighting”. Dennis Prager would do it from time to time also, saying something that sounds sincere and declarative but is supposed to be spotlighting the opposite. That’s not my autism flaring up – it’s just a reality that the human brain operates off of pattern recognition and so for sarcasm to work, it has to be absurd enough to be identified right away and these right wing political hosts spend so much time in that playbook that they forget that a significant portion of their audience isn’t going to immediately or at all catch on that the deadpan is a joke.

“We believed the hype, I guess. Maybe when you spend 30 years reading scripts about car chases everything seems like a car chase”, Tucker says as basically his only clue to sleuths listening before adding “The problem is, not everything is a car chase. Sometimes people are just smiling at each other in a grocery store. Sorry, overheated news guy. That’s not actually news.”

Those comments were references to Shepherd Smith’s frequent focus on car chases and other “happening now” news events during his daytime shows at Fox News.

Mainstream Media parrot lie about Trumps George Floyd sentiment over equality

President Trump held a news conference regarding the improving job market but diverted from the subject of economics to also comment on the pertinent subject of equality and justice as they pertain to police interactions. He honored George Floyd and noted that equality is “really what our Constitution requires and it’s what our country is all about“ and hoped that Floyd might be gazing from heaven with gladness that the country is going through that focus. Nice words. So naturally, every liar who hates him lied about it…

Trumps actual quote + my imagined paraphrase of the collective voices crafting the response went exactly like

“President Trump: “Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race … Hopefully George Floyd is looking down right now & saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country … in terms of equality”.

-followed by something like:

Corporate Press: “crap. Way too unifying and positive. um… lets go with ‘Trump sez Floyd would be impressed by the current jobless rates’, or something. No one googles this shit anyway lol”…

Not very classy, guys… It’s one thing to run with the “Trump sed to drink bleach!” type of fake quotes without looking up the actual video because you think its funny and doesn’t need to be accurate because “it sounds like something he’d say anyway” but you’re really gonna bring George Floyd into that game of liars telephone?… Rude.”

Take a look at this lineup of over a dozen blue-check-marks repeating the lie.

I didn’t examine the time stamps to located which chickens came before which eggs on when the media’s domino of dishonesty started toppling on this narrative, but they all went with the basic theme of cutting out the separation of topics between the economy and equal justice in policing in order to squish Trumps words about the George Floyd together with the other topic of the U.S. economy. The context and separation of topics was in no way unclear, but most news media knows people don’t fact-check anti-Trump reports to any degree of consequence, so it was an easy editorial choice to go with the lie.

I encourage you to follow the link to the other examples of how this was reported, but the award for most boiled-down version of the narrative was this Bloomberg post that basically just took the talking points of the smear and made it a news report. The headline reads “Trump Invokes Floyd in Jobs Remarks as Black Unemployment Soars” as a double misleader that both lies about the President invoking Floyd “in jobs remarks” (he didn’t. It was a conference on job growth but Floyd was never mentioned in any context of anything about jobs) and adding the “as [this other negative thing happens]” technique of leading the reader (as opposed to reporting on Trumps thesis that a strong economy will bring racial justice). The byline bullet point below the headline contradicts it by admitting that Trump said ‘A great day for him’ ‘after remarks on equality’ (not remarks on jobs…), and then reports that black unemployment rose to 16.8%. Then they use *this* photo of Trump mid-action of getting up or down from his seat, just to make sure the point is driven home to the reader that we’re not supposed to be viewing this favorably.

With the number of outlets that ran with the fake narrative in the mainstream media – you can imagine the level of less stringent fact checkers repeating it all over social media. I scrolled through 4 different people posting 3 different links with the lie on Facebook before I even looked other areas to see the ditto’s echoing the line that Trump claimed a deified figure of history would be their fan.

This meme was basically a fake news re-tread of a 2013 story that actually in where Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank museum and opined that “Anne Frank was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber” (his name for his followers).

Critics of James O’Keefe are prematurely dancing on his grave

Activist journalist James O’Keefe’s organization Project Veritas got one of their undercover personalities found out by the Washington Post and for some reason this is supposed to be a big deal. It isn’t, of course. O’Keefe’s projects are fishing expeditions that use undercover individuals to infiltrate organizations and report impropriety, illegal activity, or revelation of bias and internal conspiracy that contradicts and individual or organizations public presentation. Just like with actual-fishing, not every one of your lures gets a bite and that’s basically what happened here – as has happened dozens of times before with Veritas – but this time the spin is that the target (this time, The Washington Post) smelled the rat and exposed that they were targeted. Point for WashPo but that’s more of a side note than it is an actual story. Except it’s being treated as an actual-story in a transparent motivation to discredit and hopefully destroy O’Keefe – which is embarrassing because there’s just nothing there to make a big story out of. If these O’Keefe critics were smarter they would use this as a dismissive “lol – look at this cheap trick this guy tried. FAIL” type of short form “follies from Amateur Hour” commentary instead of the path his haters just can’t help themselves from taking by screaming “HA! SEE? BOOM! YOU SUCK!”. Oy vey you guys – chill…

If you think I’m exaggerating the goofy glee over a story that amounts to “a political journalist tried a sting and got stung” (I just made that up and am now disappointed in all the outlets who failed to use that turn of phrase themselves), take this piece on Mediate with the headline “Everyone Points and Laughs at James O’Keefe’s Incredibly Embarrassing Journalism Blunder”. It’s true that there is a great deal of pointing and laughing at O’Keefe over this, but there’s just no “blunder” here which is why there are no signs O’Keefe is embarrassed. Why would he be? In fact, he smartly leveraged the failure as a fundraising point and didn’t do so in a weasely “defeat means victory!” BS kind of way – he just straight up said that one of his operatives had their cover blown and the other reports that were successful in the same operation now need to be rushed to print to beat the Post from stealing the narrative.

That’s a frank and candid admission that doesn’t dodge anything and bluntly states the terms of the game he’s playing. So how is the media responding to that? With headlines like this:

But… it didn’t “blow up in his face” and he’s just claiming that he’s a Winner after Losing… he admitted a fail and put it in context of other items that are fair game for scrutiny just like any other reportage – so why this insistence on smearing him (complete with the unflattering stock photo trick of him mid-sentence so he’s making a derp face) with misleading innuendo?

Commentary Magazine gets the set-up right and the conclusion all wrong with a piece titled “Conservative Media Give Up“.

Over the course of two farcical hours, O’Keefe inadvertently established that the Washington Post’s reporters were pros, that the Post’s reporting on Moore was water-tight, and that his own organization—and Moore’s supporters, by extension—had little regard for the victims of sexual assault. After all, they had hired an activist to portray one toward a petty and political end, thus cheapening the experience of legitimate survivors.

All this is rather loathsome, and O’Keefe’s organization is due all the opprobrium it is receiving and more. But it also illustrates a condition that is rendering conservative activist media impotent: They have stopped caring about their audience.

Huh?… The first paragraph is legit but what is described right afterward is the exact opposite of what it says.

The thesis was that The Washington Post was so politically biased against Republicans that they were eager, in a politically activist (as opposed to traditional-journalistic) sense, to dive onto tabloid dirt about a Senate candidate in order to torpedo their election. O’Keefe tested this thesis. That’s his only “crime” he’s being pilloried for and that’s not a crime at all – it’s the accepted standard practice of thesis testing…

The same article even links to video O’Keefe released showing the Post’s national security reporter stating that his papers editorial board is being too hard on President Trump – mockingly adding “some bombshell”, as a way of bolstering the articles thesis that O’Keefe has “given up” on journalism and is “actively courting ignorance” in their audience. This makes no sense. O’Keefe had a thesis that the Post was unjustifiably harsh on Republicans and tested the thesis with undercover actors. He provided evidence for the thesis, got busted on one of his lures, and probably had a dozen others that just didn’t lead anywhere. So what? I too would call it a sarcastic “bombshell” (ie: not a bombshell) that the Washington Post has an anti-Republican bias, but you can’t take that position in the same article you praise what Pro’s at reporting that outlet is.

What this all amounts to is, ironically, that anti-Conservative-Media criticism has given up (even though to many degrees it never really tried). To do a take down of a figure, situation, or ideology, you have to actually take-it-down… Unfortunately however, ever since the G-Dubya years, Leftist criticism has sadly amounted to just mocking a misstep on on the other side in degrees far outside the parameters of what it merits as a mock-worthy or discrediting event. Whether it’s Bush getting a shoe thrown at him, or trying to open a locked door, or Trump tweeting something incendiary or goofy or an org like Project Veritas having a reporters cover blown amidst other successful finds – the focus is all wrong and it fails at what its attempting to do, which is tear down the individual involved.