The Fox News prime-time distortionist, Tucker Carlson, is at it again — pushing the lies that U.S. forces are actively engaging Russian troops in combat in Ukraine.
“Briefing slides prepared by the U.S. government,” he said, “began to show up, among other places, on Twitter. And the slides show in fact this is not Ukraine’s war. It’s our war. The United States is a direct combatant in a war against Russia. As we speak, American soldiers are fighting Russian soldiers.”
American soldiers are fighting Russia soldiers.
Wow! That is news.
And then Carlson showed the slides, because this is television, a visual medium. And showing the slides would help prove that what he was saying was true, unlike his previous unverified “reporting” that the U.S. and Russia were in a “war.” Not a proxy war, or an indirect war, but a real shooting war. He said it many times.
But wait!
Carlson did not show the slides that he mentioned, that were all over the place, he said.
I may not be the best digital researcher, but I went to Twitter and found no slides. I went to Google and typed in a query about U.S. and Russian troops going at it.
What I found were many stories of why the U.S. and NATO are not sending troops there. Along with one story that talked of a U.S. special forces unit advising Ukrainian troops, which did not surprise me, but who were not engaging in combat. The U.S. has admitted we have Marines in Ukraine — to guard our embassy. And they are not in combat.
I could find nothing from any source that said otherwise. If you can find info from a legitimate source — not QAnon — let me know.
If it were true, Americans would have the right to know. But in today’s day and age, if Americans were involved in combat, someone would be posting pictures, as happened at the Abu Ghraib prison, remember, where U.S. guards abused prisoners.
There are few things that are secret today.
This war, declared Carlson, “is a crime,” because it wasn’t declared by Congress. Then, somehow, he was off on a tangent about Jeffrey Epstein’s millions, who left pipe bombs on Capitol Hill on 1-6, and who killed JFK.
Misdirection is an old trick of Carlson’s. So is propaganda.
Thursday night he talked about a Pentagon briefing at which the right questions weren’t asked by the press, he said, and said he viewers could “go pull a transcript.”
A journalist would have shown the transcript, or at least posted it on their website, so people could see for themselves. Same thing for the mystery slides. But Carlson has lied so many times before he no longer has the benefit of the doubt.
But then I remembered Carlson is not a journalist. He is not to be believed. In a lawsuit (filed long before the current Dominion Voting company case), and leaning heavily on Fox lawyers arguments, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil said this: The “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’ “
Got that? Not stating facts. “Exaggeration,” big fat lies, what’s the dif?
The guy is a charlatan, a disgrace, a liar, a Putin stooge.
In the Dominion case, discovery showed that he and other Fox hosts were putting people on camera to make a case for Trump’s rigged election claims that the hosts didn’t even believe.
The worst thing is that many in Carlson’s audience believe him. That is terrifying.
He’s an entertainer, not a journalist, and he’s very good at it. Regrettably, he’s not the only one, just the most successful.
and the left is responsible for the lack of journalism as they control almost every newsroom in the nation.. They don’t ask the questions and now they even cover up for the the lies of our government
Please list the liberals who “control almost every newsroom in the nation.” Because as far as I know, most papers are owned by Conservatives.
The biggest are not conservative owned, and even where that is true, every legitimate paper draws lines between the owners and the editorial page and the news department.
In big papers — and this is hard to believe for people in business — the publisher has virtually no say in the news department. Other than hiring the editors, which is not as big a caveat as it sounds like, or at least that used to be true. Editors’ politics hardly mattered then, probably less so now.
Stu, you are thinking only about newspapers (naturally), not broadcast/cable. So, you are forgetting companies like Sinclair. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “the Sinclair Broadcast Group has come to own or operate nearly 200 television stations in some 100 markets covering more than 40 percent of American households.” Sinclair has a history of “must-run” segments that all its stations are required to broadcast, dating back to supporting the Iraq war, and running up to 2018, when news anchors at Sinclair-owned stations were required to read on-air a statement accusing mainstream media outlets of spreading “fake stories” and attempting to “control exactly what people think.” Before that they pushed the narrative of a “deep-state” cabal. Take a look at their Wikipedia entry too. And, if you’ve been following the Dominion defamation action against Fox, the internal emails show no “wall” between news and opinion, and ownership dictating coverage. Its plausible to me that other cable news also try to cater to their viewership’s bias at the expense of news, and I note CNN’s attempts to revamp and bring in a more conservative outlook.
I do think newspapers do better. Less entertainment and more concern for news and fact-checking. For example, the left was all over the NYT for giving front page extensive coverage of Hillary’s emails, to no avail. Newspapers tend to do a better job of running “both sides” of a story (to criticism that their “both sidism” is itself distorting, by those who believe there is only one side). Many, if not most newspapers still feature both liberal and conservative columnists. And I think there is more of a wall between owners, editorial and news than there is on television. Unfortunately, readership is down and viewership is up.
You are right that my comments were newspaper-centric. And far more people get their news from TV than from newspapers, something like 49% for TV to 16% for papers.
I meant their left leaning thoughts, not the ownership. Back in the day, liberals reported the news fairly at the big networks even ..now they target Conservatives.. Don’t get me wrong, it happens the other way around too but the big medial companies all roll hard left (except for FOX of course)
Thank you for this piece Stu. Should be a warning to those who watch him but unfortunately, seems like so many of the Right-wing readers veered into trashing MSM again. What is WRONG with them?
You actually call the bile and viscous lies he spews “entertainment”? …
replying to myself because didn’t mean to put this comment here. It was supposed to go somewhere else. sorry…
I don’t know what to believe but anyone who thinks their Government is telling them the truth is pathetically mistaken. You may be right to blast Tucker but the MSM doesn’t ask the questions. Glad we have him.
“Glad we have” a serial liar who is out there every day convincing ignoramuses to believe things that simply aren’t true? Yeah, that is helping us. Jesus, the things that come out of people’s mouths astound me.
Ditto. They don’t seem to realize the difference between actual journalists, editorialists and entertainers. Or don’t want to. Journalists: Woodward, Bernstein. Editorialists: Michele Goldberg. Entertainers: Hannity, Carlson, and most of the other bozos on Fox.
You actually don’t know what questions were asked. You are taking Tucker’s word for it, and THAT is a mistake. Are you telling me Peter Doocy doesn’t ask hard questions of spokes people and the president? He’s not the only one.
It is really hard to believe any of the media these days. Left,Right? Just read the facts and have and opinion show, is it really that hard?
When I was in the AF back in the very early1960s, we were told: “Believe nothing of what you hear and 10% of what you see.” (I think the 10% was aiming high.) With all of the technology available to us today, it is scary to think we are more ignorant of what’s REALLY going on in the world than we were fifty years ago.
Tucker Carlton = TC = Truth Charlatan…
He is a bullshit artist.
Responsible journalists like Chris Wallace & Shepard Smith left FOX FAKE NEWS because of the election lies and overpaid, lying polemicists like Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, et al.
The Tucker Carlson show as “entertainment” was in direct response to a lawsuit for defamation of character. The plaintiff has to show that it could feasibly be true, so the defense is that “I’m an entertainer, it’s not news ”. And he’s not the first to use that defense. What he says is able to be checked. And well it checks out. 100% no one is 100%
For Stu, when you say “ could find nothing from any source that said otherwise. If you can find info from a legitimate source – not QAnon – let me know.” I see two problems with this. There are many, many small independent and yes reputable news sources. Second, just because you can’t “find” it by the biases search engine, doesn’t make it true or not. Third, what defines a legitimate source, I can name sources that are not only flawed but flat out caught lying for the dem-socialist narrative. many others are just on repeat for the party as well.
Every news agency has it’s political bias and you watch the bias that aligns with your party. At least Carlson doesn’t have the worst bias of them all, bias of omission… the anti-journalism bias.
Now the icing on the cake. Not only is the media no longer the protected press that keep the government in check. It is now working for the government. In fact, this time the press not only aided the feds in finding this whistleblower, who should’ve been protected, they hand-delivered him to the FBI. The media working in collaboration with the feds to deliver their propaganda, is now the status quo.
To cut through the blather, can YOU find any source that says U.S. forces are in combat with Russia? Carlson asserted that was on a “slide” that he did not show.
I said I would accept a credible source, not a large one.
Find one.
This kind of “blather” gives me deja vu from the seventies, when the radicals on campus couldn’t shut up about how the “corporate media” was just propping up capitalism and the government.. “Freedom of the press is for the people who own the presses” they’d say. Of course the press can never win with the fringes– the “liberal media” was then attacked by the right. (Remember “Nixon was hounded from office by the liberal media”?) Actual facts will always offend people who wish things to be otherwise. Flat-earthers, fake moon-landing folks, 9/11 Truthers, Q-Anon crazies, and now election deniers (like Carlson in public, but not private) are all convinced that some “they” in the media are lying. (And the commies still think the media is lying). “Free Mumia” “Free the Jan 6 rioters” — it’s all the same thing. We had “Tokyo Rose”, “Hanoi Jane” and now we’ve got “Kremlin Carlson” — the most quoted American commentator in Russia.
Very perceptive. 👍
Sadly, and absurdly, and despite what we here know, Americans may actually trust Fox News.
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-news-most-trusted-and-most-watched-even-after-dominion-revelations-latest-poll-shows/
Anyone care to explain?
I can’t open the link, but it may be respondents are talking about the news shows, such as Neil Cavuto and Bret Baeir, rather than the talk hosts.
Well, what the survey says is that more Americans trust Fox for news than any other network, but it is still a minority, about 40% (41% trust it, 39% watch it)–which means that 60% of Americans don’t trust it and watch other news sources–they’re just split among the others on whom they trust and watch.
The weird thing is that, except for Fox and CBS, the number of people who trust a network are fewer than the people who nevertheless watch it. (22% trust CBS, but only 4% watch it. I’m sure they’d be happier if the numbers were reversed). That could be interpreted to mean that Fox viewers are more credulous than those viewing other networks, who take the news from their preferred source with a grain of salt.
But for those who have followed the Dominion lawsuit against Fox (not Fox viewers–they get about as much news about it as the Inquirer published about Stu’s defamation suit), the internal Fox emails revealed in discovery showed that Fox was all about telling its viewers what they wanted to hear (stolen election!) than what they knew was the truth (Sydney Powell crazy, Giuliani had no evidence, election not stolen).
I would guess that with that business model, instead of a truth-telling model, nobody watching Fox is required to hear facts they don’t like (making them trust it) while on other networks, that is not the case–hence the lower trust.
Interesting analysis. 👍
My explanation….many Fox news watchers don’t watch anything else, nor do they read. Fox News is not covering itself, so my guess is sadly, many out there are really unaware of what is going on. Others are who are aware of the real facts are MAGA cult followers or what ever you want to call people who are so brain-washed and hate the left so badly they simply refuse to believe anything that goes against their belief system. They are still ranting about the 2020 election being stolen.
Naomi, as far as I am concerned, those MAGaGOTS can bitch and moan until they drop dead. The bottom line is that orange-skinned SOB lost the election. Hell, he did not even have the plurality in 2016. The likes of Carlson, Greene, et al can all KMA!