It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen with Tucker Carlson.
Will Fox be able to ‘silence him until after the 2024 election’? It seems unlikely.
Will he be able to produce a show on Twitter while still drawing his salary from Fox? That would certainly be helpful since he could use it to pay for the show.
Will he accept Patrick Bet-David’s offer of $100 million to jump to Valuetainment? That would make simply walking away from Fox more viable, although he’d have a lot of brand-building to do.
Will he do his monolog, or will he produce a full show, complete with guest interviews? Will he produce those on some regular schedule, or just whenever he feels like he has something worth saying?
Whatever else he ends up doing, what we need him to do — what only he can do — is a show in which he periodically teaches viewers how to step through a news article or television segment and notice all the little ways in which they’re being manipulated, misled, distracted, bamboozled, hornswoggled, or simply lied to.
What I’m envisioning is something like this: Tucker sits with a cup of coffee and goes through a series of ‘news items’ — a print article here, a televised report there, some punditry now and then — while focusing not on content, but on technique:
- Note how they’re making a bunch of scattered statements, and then jumping to a conclusion as if they’ve constructed a cohesive argument. This is something people are really bad at catching, unless they practice it.
- Did you see how he answered a completely different question than the one he was asked?
- Do you see how they’re focusing on the points that will provoke your emotions, while ignoring the ones that might evoke thoughtful questions? Questions they wouldn’t be able to answer?
- This is a classic example of an ad hominem attack. If they can make you hate the messenger, you’ll be less likely to actually listen to the message.
- About two minutes ago, they used the same word to mean exactly the opposite of how they’re using it now. Why do you think they would do that?
- Isn’t it interesting how, in dozens of different stories, written by dozens of different people, at dozens of different news outlets, they end up using exactly the same two or three relatively unusual phrases. Does that seem like a coincidence?
And so on.
Ideally, he’d do this with both progressive and conservative news items to increase the scope of his audience. He shouldn’t have any trouble finding them across the entire spectrum of ideologies.
I would pay to watch this. I would buy subscriptions for my friends who homeschool their children. I would evangelize the crap out of it.
Tucker Carlson isn’t the only person in the world who could do this, of course.
Scott Adams occasionally does this kind of analysis in his Coffee With Scott Adams podcast, but (1) his presentation is so monotonous that it’s hard to stay focused on what he’s saying, and (2) he’s been canceled, so a lot of his audience has evaporated.
But Tucker is probably the only person who could get a critical mass of people to pay attention.
A critical mass of people learning to think critically about critical issues: imagine what might come of that.
