Will Tucker Carlson Become Alex Jones?

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [Will Tucker Carlson Become Alex Jones?]( Will Tucker Carlson Become Alex Jones?, Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic Carlson’s show premiered just a few days after the 2016 elections, and was immediately focused on stoking a culture war. According to The New York Times, when his show was elevated to the 8 p.m. slot in 2017, the host had his producers begin looking for small, local news stories “that were sometimes ‘really weird’ and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture.” The decision to highlight niche stories—about refugees, petty crime, DACA recipients, college-campus activism, and companies going “woke”—night after night made viewers feel as if their way of life was under an unrelenting assault by mainstream media, the left, and big business. Carlson used such examples to construct a case for his audience in favor of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory, much to the delight of the country’s most infamous bigots. The Times described this tactic as creating “an apocalyptic worldview”—a strategy that few have perfected better than Jones. On his marathon daily broadcasts, Jones is famous for shuffling through mountains of printed-out news articles, cherry-picking random facts from local news stories—he was, for example, among the first media figures to campaign against drag-queen story hours—and either embellishing them or twisting them to fit into one of his long-running conspiracy theories. Similarly, the Infowars website is a hodgepodge of racist aggregated stories misrepresenting local reporting to trigger outrage. When the local news stories dried up, Jones sent his staffers out to manufacture controversies to stoke the apocalyptic flames for a hungry audience. In a tell-all essay, Joshua Owens, a former Infowars staffer who grew disillusioned with Jones’s lies, detailed the process of having to scramble to find controversies to report on and making news up when that failed. [...] Carlson’s most vile conspiracy theorizing—around COVID vaccines, white replacement, and the notion that January 6 was a peaceful protest—are the most indelible examples of his Jones-ification. But just as important and insidious is the way that Carlson packaged his propaganda. Like Infowars, Carlson was frequently absurdist in a way that delighted his fans and trolled critics. He branched out from the one-hour cable-news format with a series of original programming on the streaming platform Fox Nation. With titles such as Blown Away: The People vs. Wind Power, The UFO Files, and Cattle Mutilations, these subscriber-only offerings appear nearly indistinguishable from the direct-to-video Infowars documentaries that Jones became famous for in his early-internet days. The most viral of Carlson’s originals was an episode called The End of Men, whose promo featured a nude man bathing his testicles in ultraviolet light while Also Sprach Zarathustra plays. (You might remember the song from the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.) - [Tucker Carlson’s Exit Shows Who’s the Real Star at Fox]( Tucker Carlson’s Exit Shows Who’s the Real Star at Fox, Jack Shafer, POLITICO If you’re wondering did Tucker Carlson jump, was he pushed or were he and Fox News wrestling on the ledge of a skyscraper, and the two of them fell 57 stories to flattened death on a New York concrete sidewalk, you’re thinking about this the wrong way. The truth of the matter is that it doesn’t matter much why the host of cable TV’s most popular show on cable TV’s most popular network has suddenly left the building. Nor does it matter much who replaces Tucker Carlson in the 8 p.m. block because the “talent” at the Fox News Channel has never been the star. Glenn Beck wasn’t the star in 2009 when he generated the largest viewership Fox had ever seen in the 5 p.m. hour. Bill O’Reilly, Carlson’s predecessor on the Fox schedule and the previous king of cable news, the subject of a zillion magazine profiles and the instigator of a tubful of moral panics, wasn’t the star, either. Both of them were carried out with the tide to positions of broadcast irrelevance when Fox tired of them, a longitude and latitude Carlson now finds himself in. Perhaps you recall Megyn Kelly, another Fox sensation who hasn’t had much of a career since splitting the network. What Beck, O’Reilly and Kelly didn’t understand at the time, and what somebody should explain to Carlson this evening, is that Fox itself, which convenes the audience, is the star. And the star maker is whomever network owner Rupert Murdoch has assigned to run the joint. The nighttime hosts, as talented as they are — and Beck, O’Reilly, Kelly and Carlson are among some of the most talented broadcasters to slop the makeup on and speak into the camera — are as replaceable as the members of the bubblegum group the Archies, as interchangeable as the actors who’ve played James Bond, as expendable as the gifted musicians who played lead guitar for the Yardbirds. - [Daily Kos is $82,672 away from our monthly goal. Can you chip in $5 now to help us close the books on April?]( - [Rupert Murdoch's management grows erratic]( Rupert Murdoch's management grows erratic, Max Tani, Semafor Some moves, like Emma Tucker’s takeover of the Journal, have been painfully slowly. But the sudden moves, the endless leaks, and the general sense of an out-of-control train has also raised questions in the middle and top ranks of the company about the elder Murdoch’s state of mind, temperament, and what the changes suggest about the path forward for the media empire he built. “There’s a long list of pretty drastic steps from him this year,” one person familiar with the details of today’s firing told Semafor. “People asking questions about whether an octogenarian should exert influence over the country should also ask whether a nonagenarian should exert influence over America’s most powerful media conglomerate." [...] Even small details about Murdoch’s recent behavior have been somewhat perplexing. I was surprised when, after finding his email in the Dominion discovery documents earlier this year, the News Corp CEO seemed willing to respond to questions on the record. He gamely responded to several queries I had about the television show Succession and Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter. - [Could age hamper President Biden's reelection bid? Have you seen the competition?]( Could age hamper President Biden's reelection bid? Have you seen the competition?, Rex Huppke, USA Today Much will be made of Biden’s age, and while it’s an understandable concern, you need only look to the likely slate of Republican presidential candidates to see why it shouldn’t matter. The GOP front-runner is former President Donald Trump, who at 76 is not an avatar for youthful vigor. He was recently indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. He’s facing a civil trial involving a rape allegation that starts Tuesday in Manhattan, along with an array of other criminal investigations. Oh, and he still denies the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and fomented an attack on the U.S. Capitol. [...] The reality is this: Anyone not named Donald Trump will have to survive the wrath of Trump, and will have to kowtow to MAGA enthusiasts who wouldn’t know the word “moderate” if it burst out of the Bud Light cans they just ran over with their trucks. That’s not a recipe for winning over independents, suburban women or really anyone who isn’t already a diehard Trump loyalist. And without bringing in new voters, a GOP presidential candidate can’t win. Biden being up in years would be a bigger issue for Democrats if the Republican Party didn’t presently have the vibe of an abandoned garbage barge surrounded by angry seagulls. - [Show your support for progressive, independent news with a Daily Kos t-shirt—they're union decorated and made in the USA! Click here to get yours]( - [India's population to surpass China this week - UN]( India's population to surpass China this week - UN, George Wright, BBC News India will overtake China to become the most populous country in the world by the end of this week, the United Nations has said. India's population is expected to reach 1,425,775,850 people by the end of April, the new data shows. A different UN body last week predicted that India would overtake China by the middle of this year. The Asian nations have accounted for more than a third of the global population for over 70 years. "China will soon cede its long-held status as the world's most populous country," the UN's Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) said in a statement. It added that "due to the uncertainty associated with estimating and projecting populations, the specific date on which India is expected to surpass China in population size is approximate and subject to revision". - [The unnecessary price of Covid-19]( The unnecessary price of Covid-19, Peter Bergen, CNN A problem in the US government’s early response was the lack of effective tests for the virus during the first months of the pandemic. By contrast, South Korea, better prepared for the emergency, had tens of thousands of tests running daily by mid-February 2020, according to the report. The report found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – despite its name suggesting that it is at the forefront of preventing the spread of disease – didn’t do operational pandemic preparedness, but instead acts as a quasi-academic institution that collects and analyzes data after an incident has happened. In a chilling finding, the report says when it came to tracking Covid-19 cases in the United States, researchers at The Atlantic magazine’s Covid Tracking Project did a better job in real-time than the CDC did. Compounding the problem at the federal level was President Trump, who, as is well known, continuously played down the threat posed by the virus and refused to wear a mask when masking was one of the few tools that prevented the spread of the virus before vaccines. By April 2020, Trump had decided that Covid wasn’t much worse than the flu, and he wanted to “reopen” the economy as he was “deep into his reelection campaign,” according to the report. As a result, the Covid Crisis Group concluded that “Trump was a co-morbidity” with Covid. Comorbidity is a medical term meaning that a patient suffers from two or more chronic diseases simultaneously. 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