Pained NYT journo describes what it’s like to watch Tucker: ‘Way more dangerous than anybody realizes’
Tucker Carlson, in case you didn’t know, is the most dangerous man on television.
At least that’s according to Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish, two hacks from The New York Times whose job it was to delve into the sordid world of Fox News primetime television and then write a three-part hit piece on Tucker Carlson’s popular program.
So while dedicated journalists like Benjamin Hall are risking life and limb reporting from war-torn Ukraine, Confessore and Yourish are risking their mental health by watching conservative television programming—and they’ll probably never recover from the shock.
Their “deep-dive” consisted of watching endless hours of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and one can only hope that perhaps they actually learned something useful about the country from the instructive viewing. They may even transform into closeted right-wingers, which will make working at The New York Times a difficult prospect going forward.
Confessore, who wrote the articles, and Yourish, who was the series’ graphic artist, both appeared on Nicolle Wallace’s program on MSNBC to discuss their work.
“What is—does everyone at Fox like him and agree with [Carlson]?” Wallace asked Confessore.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Confessore replied, “because what Fox is really good at, is getting the most people to watch the shows.”
“They’re a ratings machine, definitely,” Wallace concurred, “but at what cost? I mean Chris Wallace left. Does that not bother anybody? Does no one prefer to be associated with Chris Wallace’s form of television than Tucker Carlson’s?”
Confessore then went on to explain that Fox News apparently experienced a “low-grade civil war” during the Trump presidency, wherein primetime personalities like Tucker Carlson allegedly staged a kind of coup and began setting the news agenda for the entire network.
“They’re giving less airtime overall to their own reports,” Confessore continued, “and they’re giving less airtime to people who are either anti-Trump conservatives, or middle-of-the-road, or liberals. This is not to say Fox doesn’t do journalism. They have people in Ukraine at great risk, they’ve covered a lot of big stories. But, they really are changing the emphasis, they’re making their dayside shows more and more like primetime, because that is what Fox does best, as their chief executive says.”
Wallace then asked Yourish to chime in on what it was like to watch “all these hours of Tucker Carlson’s show.”
“It was revealing in a way that I can’t even describe,” Yourish said, with a pained expression on her face.
“I mean, I had no idea. I had not watched the show before this project, and once I did, I realized that what we wanted to do would create…would be to create an immersive experience so that the people who read The New York Times, who most likely don’t watch the show on a regular basis, could feel what it’s like, because I think it’s easy to dismiss…um, to dismiss what he is saying as, you know, just another cable TV news host. But he’s way more powerful and the content is way more dangerous than I think what anybody realizes unless you’re watching the show on a daily basis,” she contended.
Tucker Carlson must be pleased. There can hardly be any greater compliment than to be called “dangerous” by New York Times reporters.
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