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.