Watch the full episode here:
Good evening. It's Wednesday, June 7th. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday to Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
CNN's top executive barely lasted a year on the job. Chris Licht, who was brought in by the Most Trusted Name in News in the wake of multiple ethical scandals and collapsing ratings that drove out his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, was fired today. Most of the corporate press barely disguised their delight over his firing. One of Licht's primary directives was that the only way to save CNN and find a way to again attract an audience was to have CNN cease being little more than a messaging clearing house for the Democratic Party.
Nothing enraged corporate media employees more than the idea that a news outlet should be independent rather than held in captivity to establishment neoliberalism. One of the few weapons they have left is ensuring that these media corporations remain a dissent-free sector of liberal propaganda, and Licht explicitly vowed to liberate CNN from that grim task. The reality is that cable news as a medium is dying, and CNN is close to irretrievably dead, so it hardly matters who captains that rotted ship as it deservedly crashes and then finally sinks. But the story is nonetheless worth covering because the media reaction to Licht, and their determination to keep every media corporation in line with Democratic Party ideology, reveals a great deal about their ongoing function.
Then: while CNN collapses, Tucker Carlson – the most successful cable host in the history of that medium – launched his show last night on Twitter, in scaled-down form for now. But there was no denying that the launch was a success. While view counts on Twitter are less than models of clarity and reliability, to understate the case, it is clear that millions watched Carlson's first monologue about Ukraine. That Carlson is able to find such a big audience without Fox, and that he's already obviously feeling far less constrained now that he's independent, are both highly encouraging signs for the future of independent media, and highly discouraging signs for the future of corporate media.
And then, finally: Russia once again suffered a major attack on key infrastructure: a huge dam in Russia-controlled Southern Ukraine. Despite the fact that its destruction would deprive Crimea of water, both Ukraine and leading U.S. and European elites are declaring as though it is proven fact that Russia is responsible for this attack – all this, despite the fact that we have repeatedly been subjected to lies and propaganda falsely assigning blame to Russia in the past, including claims that they blew up their own pipeline, exploded a cafe in St. Petersburg that kill a Russian nationalist journalist and injured 19 other Russians in attendance and that Russia even attacked the Kremlin with drones.
We'll attempt to sort this all out - as well as analyze these other stories - with the most independent of independent journalists, Michael Tracey, who will join us shortly.
As a reminder, our System Update is available in podcast form 12 hours after the show first airs live here on Rumble. Simply follow us on Spotify, Apple and every other major podcasting platform. You can rate and review the show and help spread its availability.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting now.
Most of you don't likely know who Chris Licht is and there's really no reason for you to have known him. He was brought in roughly a year ago as the chief executive of CNN after his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, suffered all kinds of ethical scandals, including claims that he was involved in a consensual adult relationship with another CNN executive, that he was helping Chris Cuomo combat allegations against that CNN host, that he, too, had been engaged in improper conduct in helping his brother, the governor of New York, fend off assault allegations and all sorts of other problems at the network, including the fact that nobody was watching the network. It was simply a collapsing disaster.
Chris Licht was brought in and one of the things that he immediately did and tried to implement was the idea that one of the reasons CNN is falling and failing is because nobody trusted it any longer. And the reason nobody trusted it any longer is that it is openly and blatantly little more than a messaging machine for the Democratic Party – and anybody who wants that already has MSNBC to give it to them. There's no reason anybody would go to CNN in order to get it. They became addicted to the ratings high, which was nothing more than a sugar high that they got that was actually ushered in by Donald Trump and by talking about Trump 24 hours a day. They staved off collapse but with Trump gone, there was simply no reason for anybody else to tune in to CNN any longer and their ratings continued to collapse.
What makes this story interesting is not the fact that now they're going to bring in somebody else to oversee CNN's inevitable and well-deserved collapse. What's interesting is the reaction among most of the corporate media, both inside CNN and out, who are celebrating Licht’s demise solely because he wanted to transform that network away from being shills to the Democratic Party and into the independent news network that it once was. That really reveals how the corporate media sees itself in general and the fact that they wanted his head on a pike and now have it now are celebrating even while they know that it hardly matters who supervises or runs CNN, that cable news is dying along with much of the corporate media. That's the really revealing part.
So, let's look first at what the story is from The New York Times today. It says, “Chris Licht is Out at CNN, Leaving Network at a Crossroads. Mr. Licht turbulent time running the 24-hour news organization lasted slightly more than a year.”
Chris Licht, the former television producer who oversaw a brief and chaotic run as the chairman of CNN, is out at the network.
David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN’s parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, informed staff on Wednesday morning that he had met with Mr. Licht and that he was leaving, effective immediately.
Mr. Licht’s 13-month run at CNN was marked by one controversy after another. He got off to a bumpy start even before he had officially started when he oversaw the shuttering of the costly CNN+ streaming service at the request of its network’s new owners, who were skeptical about a stand-alone digital product. The cuts resulted in scores of layoffs. (The New York Times. June 7, 2023)
Let's take a moment to remember that because it was one of the funniest things to ever happen to media prior to Chris Licht's arrival. CNN and their bosses, including Jeff Zucker, had decided that one way to save CNN was to create a streaming service that you had to pay for. And on the streaming service, they were going to offer the same host whom you can already watch for free but – like everybody else in the country – you were choosing not to because you had no interest in what they were saying. So, they were essentially saying, here are all these people who, if you want, you can watch for free and you're choosing not to. Nobody watches them. And so, our genius idea is we're now going to make you pay to watch them so that we can generate profit for ourselves and you will pay to watch the people you've already made clear you have no interest in. It lasted a grand total of 21 days. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, on marketing and publicity and trumpeting the arrival of this exciting streaming service. And then Chris Licht brought it in. They ordered him to kill it. After 21 days, it was dead. And as The New York Times says, the cuts resulted in scores of layoffs for which he was blamed. It goes on:
Ratings plummeted during Mr. Licht’s management and a series of programming miscues — including an il-fated morning show co-anchored by Don Lemon, as well as organizing a town hall featuring former President Donald J. Trump that was subject to withering criticism — did little to shore up support with his colleagues. (The New York Times. June 7, 2023)
I think this is the really important part. The straw that broke the camel's back for Chris Licht was his decision to take the presidential candidate who was leading in all the polls – not only to become the Republican nominee but to be the next president – he's winning virtually all polls against Joe Biden if he were to get the nomination and leading all polls by 20 or 35, 30 points over the next leading candidate, Ron DeSantis. So, needless to say, by definition, Donald Trump has a very good chance to become the next president. He also happened to be the president just two years ago. And yet the idea that CNN should interview him, should allow him to go on their airwaves and let the American people hear what he has to say in response to questions being asked of him by a reporter who was told to and is fully capable of responding to whatever he says, fact-checking him if she thinks it's merited as she did. This idea was so controversial inside CNN. In fact, it was worse than controversial. It provoked large amounts of indignation among CNN staffers to the point that people like Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amanpour went on the air and criticized CNN for the crime of interviewing Donald Trump. This is how institutionally rotted that network is. They really do believe that their only mission is to promote the Democratic Party, or at the very least, do everything possible to sabotage Donald Trump and his movement. They are overtly an activist organization, and that activism is all about promoting the Democratic Party and ensuring the Trump movement never obtains power again, even if the American people decide to vote for Donald Trump.
And so, putting him on the air in that town hall that they had with him was by far their biggest rating night in a long, long time: it got over 3 million viewers, which is a different universe for what CNN ever gets. They just had a similar town hall with Nikki Haley, who's another GOP presidential candidate with Jake Tapper and they got a grand total of 550,000 people watching – only 100,000 or 150,000 people in the so-called demo. The only thing that matters, really, the age group that advertisers care about, which is 25 to 54, they could barely get half a million people to watch a town hall with Nikki Haley. So, the only time that ever anyone watches CNN still is when they got Donald Trump to come on their network. And it becomes so ingrained in the culture and the ethos of American corporate media is the idea that their singular mission is to ensure the victory and success of the Democratic Party, CNN journalists were outraged about Chris Licht's decision to allow Donald Trump to vandalize their airwaves. That is how far gone the corporate media is in the United States. And it's not just CNN journalists who thought that way, most of the corporate media did.
Things deteriorated last week when The Atlantic published a 15,000-word profile extensively documenting Mr. Licht’s stormy tenure, including criticism of the network’s pandemic coverage that rankled the network’s rank-and-file. (The New York Times. June 7, 2023)
The entire media was out to get Chris Licht for no reason other than the fact that he wanted to prevent CNN from continuing to act as a servant to the Democratic Party, not for ideological reasons but just because CNN was failing and collapsing by trying to be that – nobody was watching,
Further worsening matters was CNN’s financial performance. The network generated $750 million in profit last year, including one-time losses from the CNN+ streaming service, down from $1.25 billion the year before. (The New York Times. June 7, 2023)
You may wonder how CNN makes that much profit when nobody watches and the answer is twofold. One is they still do attract a lot of attention to things like their website. But the bigger reason is that CNN is on every cable network and is on every cable package. Cable companies pay CNN to include their network in their cable packages because they assume, even though it seems to be quite untrue, that people who pay for cable want CNN – they never watch it but that's where CNN's profit comes from: cable companies pay them for the right to include them in the cable package, even though nobody watches them. The article goes on:
Mr. Licht’s abrupt departure, earlier reported by Puck, represents the latest hit in a tumultuous era for the network.
In December 2021, the prime-time anchor Chris Cuomo was fired amid an ethics scandal involving his brother, the former Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York.
Two months later, the network’s longtime chief executive, Jeff Zucker, was let go for failing to disclose a relationship with a colleague, the senior executive Allison Gollust, who was likewise pushed out within weeks of Mr. Zucker’s departure.
It did not help matters for Mr. Licht that Mr. Zucker enjoyed wide loyalty from top anchors as well as rank-and-file workers, even after his exit. Once employees began souring on Mr. Licht, Mr. Zucker turned into a quasi-grievance switchboard for frustrated staff members.
One of Mr. Licht’s first big programming moves was to reassign Mr. Lemon from his prime-time perch to a new morning show. Mr. Licht said the show, which Mr. Lemon would anchor with Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins, would “set the tone for the news organization.”
Instead, “CNN This Morning,” which debuted in November, was marred by low ratings and tensions on and off the set. Two months after Mr. Lemon said that a woman over the age of 50 was not “in her prime,” he was fired, effectively blowing up the show that had been Mr. Licht’s signature project.
That was not the only misstep. Mr. Licht took his time — Warner Bros. Discovery executives believed far too much time — to figure out a prime-time lineup as it was rapidly losing viewers.
To the shock of many CNN staff members, the network began last month to occasionally lose to Newsmax in total viewers in prime time. And the Trump town hall, which aired on May 10, was excoriated both outside and within CNN. (The New York Times. June 7, 2023)
In other words, that was really the last straw – the fact that he dared put a Republican – not just any Republican, but Donald Trump – on CNN's airwaves. They simply do not believe that media outlets any longer should report on people who disagree with Democratic Party ideology or who in any way have any relationship to Donald Trump or to his campaign.
Now, a serious historical revision is going on in a way that only our media can do. What they're trying to say is that this is proof that any attempt to liberate media outlets from Democratic Party servitude or to suggest that the media outlets have a responsibility to do something other than just advance American liberalism is likely to fail. In other words, they're trying to say CNN was this model of great success until Chris Licht came in and caused it all to fail.
Here, for example, is a tweet today from a former Washington Post journalist, and then he went to The Atlantic, Lowery:
Chris Licht: the latest in a line of media leaders who burn their own house down with their determination to be anti-woke and prove their “independence” from liberals who criticize them on Twitter. (@Wesleylowery June 7, 2023)
So that's the narrative that they're trying to create – that CNN failed under Chris Licht because he had the audacity to say that news outlets should be independent and that they should be immune from the demands of liberals on Twitter, that they only adhere to liberal ideology. That is as explicit as it gets about what their views are and what media outlets should do.
The reality is this is all a fairy tale. Long before Chris Licht came in to run CNN, CNN's ratings were already in total decline, in free fall, precisely because nobody trusted them, precisely because everybody knew they were a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.
Here from Forbes in February 2022, so just days before Chris Licht was hired and Jeff Zucker was fired. There you see the headlines: “CNN's Ratings Collapse: Prime Time Down Nearly 70% In The Key Demo” – 70%. CNN's ratings were described as in collapse before Chris Licht came on board. And in great part, that was due to the fact that CNN lost all of the trust it had built up over several decades by turning itself into a pro-Democratic party, anti-Trump outlet during the Trump years.
Here, too, from The Daily Beast in December 2021, a couple of months before Jeff Zucker was fired and Chris was brought in. “CNN bottomed out in 2021: Will viewers come back? The network reigned supreme at the end of the Trump era but has fallen back to earth. What happened?”
That I think is the most important thing to note here: the reason these media outlets are collapsing is because people no longer trust them. And how you rebuild trust? There's only one way to do that, and that is to prove that you are not captive to either one of these parties, but instead are independent and willing to report things honestly.
A major reason, according to Chris Licht, that CNN had lost faith among the public, that nobody trusted them any longer was because of their constantly hysterical COVID coverage. You probably remember when Donald Trump was president, they constantly had a clock or a chart counting in this gruesome, dreary way the number of people who died of COVID, as though each one of those corpses was a direct fault of Donald Trump. And then suddenly, when Joe Biden came in, CNN totally lost interest in how many people were dying of COVID, even though more people died of COVID under Joe Biden than under Donald Trump – despite the fact that Trump ushered in the vaccine that CNN told everybody to take. And obviously, when you do things like that, when you so blatantly exploit a pandemic for purely partisan and political ends, of course, the public will lose trust in you.
Here is from the new media outlet Semafor which reports a lot on media. Its editor-in-chief is Ben Smith, who is a longtime media columnist for The New York Times. This is by Max Tanny on June 2023: “CNN Lost Trust Over COVID Coverage, Internal Report Found.”
The Atlantic’s Friday profile of the embattled CEO profile Chris Licht drew cringes at Hudson Yards — but also anger over Licht’s criticism of the network’s award-winning pandemic coverage.
“In the beginning, it was a trusted source – this crazy thing, no one understands it, help us make sense of it. What’s going on?” Licht said. “And I think then it got to a place where, ‘Oh wow, we gotta keep getting those ratings. We gotta keep getting the sense of urgency.’”
“People walked outside and they go, ‘This is not my life. This is not my reality. You guys are just saying this because you need the ratings, you need the clicks. I don’t trust you,’” he said.
The network won multiple prizes for its coverage of Covid-19, including the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Cronkite/Jackson Prize, which was awarded to Dr. Sanjay Gupta for his coverage “correcting Covid-19 misinformation.”
But Licht’s criticism was drawn from CNN’s own research.
Last year, CNN commissioned a survey examining viewer trust and the places where CNN was succeeding and falling short with viewers across the ideological spectrum. According to a partial copy of the report, which hasn’t been revealed before, CNN’s coverage of Covid-19 was the third leading cause of distrust in the network behind liberal bias and “the Chris Cuomo situation.”
Survey respondents of all ideological stripes criticized the network’s "overly dramatic and sensational" and "dire" reporting, the report said. (Semafor. June 5, 2023)
So, this is the reality – the reason, trust and faith in media outlets and corporate media outlets are in freefall at exactly the time people are turning to independent media more and more as we're about to show you in the next segment – regarding Tucker Carlson’s return show on Twitter – is precisely because people understand that in the Trump years, these media outlets devoted themselves to the destruction of one party and the advancement of another. They also got extremely irresponsible with hysterical and false reporting on things like Russiagate and COVID. They are widely perceived to have a liberal bias and therefore nobody trusts them any longer. And so, with the exception of a couple of media giants like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, pretty much every sector of media is failing. Fox News is now failing because it got rid of Tucker Carlson, and its ratings have been in decline ever since because people understand that if you're a news network that fires your most popular host because he won't promote your ideology, you're not really a news network, you're an ideological activist outlet, and people no longer trust those. And that's why people are turning more and more to independent media. And the fact that the corporate media, almost all of them, reacted with such anger toward Chris Licht's attempt to make CNN just a little bit more independent, and to say that it should no longer be this outlet of partisan captivity in the Democratic Party, shows you that the corporate media believes, even if it means they're going to fail, that their overarching mission is to advance the Democratic Party and ensure the defeat of the Republican Party. People already see this. Polls overwhelmingly show that they see it. And the reason we decided to cover this somewhat amusing episode is not that it matters who steers the ship of any of these declining organizations. It doesn't. But because the reaction of the rest of the media is so revealing about how they see their own function.
As I said in just a second after this little break, we're going to be back. We have Michael Tracey, come on. We're going to talk about Carlson's new program and the reaction to it and also the destruction of a dam in Ukraine that yet again, American the European elites are saying with no evidence, was carried out by Russia. We'll be right back.
We, at System Update, would like to thank Field of Greens for being a great sponsor of the show. Field of Greens has allowed us to stay independent in our journalism. It’s a trusted brand of Glenn’s and he takes their fruit and vegetable supplement everyday. Visit www.fieldofgreens.com and use promo code: GLENN for 15% off your first order and 10% more for recurring orders. Thank you Field of Greens and let’s get back to the show.
Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News on April 24, just about six weeks ago, despite the fact that he had long been and continues to be the most-watched host on any cable network. And the question is, why would Fox News fire its most popular and most-watched cable host? That is still a mystery that has not really been answered, although I think we're starting to get a lot of clues about part of the reason being ideological, the fact that Tucker Carlson was increasingly out of step with Republican establishment ideology. His most frequent targets, along with the CIA and the FBI, were leading Republican figures like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, much more so often than even Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer on the most central priority of the CIA and the U.S. security state, Joe Biden's War in Ukraine – Tucker Carlson was one of the leading opponents of that war, even though most of the GOP establishment is fully on board with it and vehemently supports it.
Just like what happened with Glenn Beck roughly a decade earlier, when he was certainly the most-watched host in the history of cable at the 5 p.m. slot, and yet Fox News fired him. Part of the reason is ideological that no matter how many viewers you get watching your show, if what you're convincing them of is contrary to the political views or the interests of the owners of that network, you will only last for so long. And that's the reason why corporate media really cannot be trusted. There are people doing good work in corporate media. I certainly think Tucker Carlson did good work while he was at FOX, there are a couple of other people at Fox who I think are doing their best within those constraints. The reality, however, is that you can only do so much because as long as people are paying your paycheck and controlling what it is that you can and can't say, eventually – if you step over too many lines ideologically – it doesn't matter how successful you are, you will end up being fired. That was something I obviously discovered myself when I was at The Intercept, my own media outlet that I founded. And yet, because I wanted to report on Joe Biden in a way that was incriminating of him just a couple of weeks before the election, the senior editorial staff of The Intercept, even though my contract prohibited them from doing so, interfered with my editorial process, prohibited me from publishing my own article at the media outlet that was founded on my name because they had ideological lines that could not be crossed – specifically anything that might have helped Donald Trump win the election, even if it was good reporting, was something that could not be done. It was only once I left that I realized the full extent to which I had been constrained, even subliminally or subconsciously, by the fact that I was working within a corporate structure and a media controlled by other people. And obviously, Tucker Carlson has found that out firsthand as well. I can see it in how he left and now how he is speaking in a different way already with the first episode of a show that appeared on Twitter last night.
Here you see it. He entitled it episode one. It is a scaled-down version of his show for now. He doesn't have any guests yet. It's only a 10 to 12-minute monologue similar to the kind that he would begin his show with when he was at Fox. I think probably the most important and popular part of his show was this monologue. So, for now, until they're capable and ready and up and running to have remote guests on, this is what the show is going to be, the monologue. And as I said, I don't think Twitter’s metrics are particularly reliable. It says here that it's been watched by 87.6 million people. I doubt 87.6 million people watched this monologue. I highly doubt that. In fact, if so, that would be the most-watched television event in the history of TV or for at least several decades, that essentially one-third or one-fourth of the American population. I think what happens a lot is if this gets retweeted into your feed, that counts to the View as if you scrolled by its account. But what clearly is the case, just based on the number of retweets alone, we don't have that here, but it's something like 270,000 retweets, close to a million likes. Yeah, it's 186,000 retweets and 700,000 likes already; 40,000 bookmarks, 21,000, quote-tweets. Clearly, more than a million people, well over a million people watched this monologue, which already makes it more successful than pretty much any show on CNN or MSNBC. And we'll see how once the awareness builds up the Tucker Show is on Twitter, remember, only 20% to 25% of Americans use Twitter regularly. So, he has a lot of ceiling left to fill. We'll see how many people end up watching it. But clearly, this is a successful debut.
Now, before we bring Michael Tracey on to talk about this and most importantly, the content of what Tucker said in his monologue and the way in which it is characterized by the media, I want to just show you the media reaction to it. It was as predictable as it was negative, but the point in which they were angry over specific things that he said I think is incredibly interesting. So here, just take a couple of examples.
CNN, which would kill to have that many people watching any of their programs when they don't have Donald Trump on, reports: “Tucker Carlson launches first episode of a low budget Twitter show after Fox News firing.”
Nearly a month after vowing a return to right-wing commentary through a show on Elon Musk’s Twitter, the fired Fox News host made good on his promise Tuesday evening and posted a 10-minute monologue to the social media platform.
The commentary, which appeared next to a “Tucker on Twitter” logo at the corner of the screen, was in the same style as viewers have come to expect from Carlson, a conspiracy-peddling talk show host who gave voice to some of the most extreme ideas in right-wing politics. (CNN. June 6, 2023)
What is that style, CNN, that viewers have come to expect from Carlson, “a conspiracy-pedaling” talk show host?
The NYT’s Katie Robertson and Jeremy Peters summarized the first episode like this: “He expressed sympathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and mocked President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. He accused the mainstream media of lying. (CNN. June 6, 2023)
Oh, perish the thought. Apparently, only right-wing people mock President Zelenskyy and accuse the mainstream media of lying, which, by the way, is what the right-wing means now that if you don't trust institutions of power, mainstream institutions of power, the CIA, the FBI, Big Tech and large media outlets, that is how you get labeled right wing. Nothing else is required.
He wrapped up by declaring that UFOs and extraterrestrial life are ‘actually real.’” (CNN. June 6, 2023)
Just to try to make him seem crazy. Even though there are a lot of scientists, a lot of people who study extraterrestrial life, who believe that there is now evidence that it exists. But this whole article is just kind of an exercise in empty labels tossed around to signal the people that you're supposed to hate. Even though he focused his entire monologue on something that many, many Americans support, which is opposition to the U.S. role in the proxy war in Ukraine.
According to The Guardian, their headline is “Tucker Carlson Peddles Conspiracy Theories on Twitter Debut From His Barn.” So, this is all part of the mockery. It's low budget, there were people noting that he operated his own teleprompter, he did it from his barn. Why is this bad? In order to be credible as a journalist, do you have to work for a gigantic media corporation and have a team of 100 people around you to operate every little device that you use? The sub-headline here is “Ex-Fox News host backs Russia and Insults Ukraine's Zelenskyy in a ten-minute monologue greeted with widespread derision”.
Widespread derision among whom? Here's what they say: “Tucker Carlson's debut on Twitter was greeted with widespread derision.” It was watched by millions of people way more than would ever read a Guardian article. This “widespread derision” means the liberal part of the corporate media that nobody watches.
Tucker Carlson’s debut on Twitter was greeted with widespread derision, as the former Fox News host backed Russia in its war with Ukraine, abused the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, invoked conspiracy theories about 9/11 and Jeffrey Epstein and mused on the existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life.
“Tucker Carlson’s lies cost Fox $800m,” said Anne Applebaum, a historian of authoritarianism, referring to the $787.5m settlement the network signed with Dominion Voting Systems over its broadcast of Donald Trump’s election lies, shortly before Carlson was fired. “Now he is still lying, and Twitter will eventually pay the price too”. (The Guardian. June 7, 2023)
That paragraph is itself a lie. Tucker Carlson was not one of the people spreading the claims about Dominion voting machines. Not even the lawsuit alleged that. In fact, Tucker was one of the people going on the air at the time, as we showed you on an entire show we did examining this, telling his audience that didn't want to hear it, that the claims of Sidney Powell and others that Dominion had engaged in voter fraud lacked evidence and until that evidence was presented, you shouldn't believe it. So, the idea that Tucker Carlson cost Fox $800 million, which is what The Guardian said quoting Anne Applebaum, is a lie.
But who is Anne Applebaum? Anne Applebaum is a neoconservative who was one of the people who told the American public that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. She was a vocal advocate of the war in Iraq. She was a vocal advocate of the regime change operation in Syria to remove Bashar al-Assad that destroyed Syria. She was a vocal advocate of the regime change war in Libya that turned Libya into a hellhole of ISIS and slave markets and anarchy. And of course, she was one of the people pushing every version of Russiagate, including the Steele dossier and all the ones that got proven to be lies. The fact that she's held up as this paragon of truth, while The Guardian says that it was Tucker Carlson who spread conspiracy theories and lies, shows you how just utterly manipulated these terms are. The article goes on.
The first taste of what that audience can expect included claims that Ukraine blew up the Kakhovka dam, not Russia, and lewd insinuations about the Republican senator Lindsey Graham. Carlson said Graham was “attracted” to the “rat-like” Zelenskiy and “aroused” by “the aroma of death”. (The Guardian. June 7, 2023)
How is that not true? Like Anne Applebaum, Lindsey Graham has also supported every single American war, including Joe Biden's war in Ukraine. It's very reasonable to conclude that they are indeed “aroused by the aroma of death” as they spend their lives dedicating themselves to urging more and more wars.
Carlson also called Zelenskiy “sweaty” […] a “comedian turned oligarch”, a “persecutor of Christians”. (The Guardian. June 7, 2023)
And he was referring there to the fact that President Zelenskyy ordered closed some of the oldest Russian Orthodox churches in Ukraine because of suspicions of their loyalty.
Carlson also said: “What exactly happened on 9/11? Well, it’s still classified. How did Jeffrey Epstein make all that money? How did he die? How about JFK? And so endlessly on”. (The Guardian. June 7, 2023)
Meaning “We're constantly being lied to by institutions of authority and power that use classified documents to hide the truth and hide what they do” – mainstream media outlets which are supposed to be devoted to being adversarial to those institutions. The only Pulitzer Prize The Guardian ever won into this long in history was when we published classified material showing the NSA was lying. And yet now, they want to stigmatize the idea that anybody who is skeptical of the pronouncements of leading institutions of authority or the idea that whatever Ukraine and the Ukrainian government say we have to accept on faith, that person is a conspiracy theorist. Why do they quote Anne Applebaum, one of the leading advocates of the Iraq war, and every other lie told to justify American wars since then, as the expert on what is and is not disinformation? This is the game they play all the time.
All right. Let's bring Michael Tracey on. I know he's, as always, very eager, filled with all sorts of insights and all kinds of wisdom that he's dying to share with us.
G. Greenwald: Mike, are you there? There you are. So good to see you.
Michael Tracey: By the way, I'm now going by the title Historian of Authoritarianism.
(They laugh)
G. Greenwald: I mean, it's just so funny that they invent these titles of expertise they just assign whomever they want to be the authority on something. How is she a historian of authoritarianism or the person whom you bring on to say what is a lie and what is not?
So first of all, I just showed you the media's reaction to Tucker's return. They, like mocked a bunch of that kind of stylistic stuff but the reaction to the substance of what he said, which is really just 10 minutes of urging skepticism about the pronouncements of leading institutions of authority, is kind of amazing, given that's supposed to be their job, and yet now they stigmatize it.
Michael Tracey: Well, yeah, I especially like that passive-voice ridicule in the Guardian article where they said that the show was greeted with widespread derision. That just means we at the Guardian hereby wish to deride Tucker Carlson. I mean, are they referring to other than themselves? But then just phrasing it as this passive-voiced little dig […]
G. Greenwald: And like CNN journalist on Twitter and like other liberal journalists on Twitter, that's what they mean, the little, tiny incestuous world to which they pay attention and that they think is the only one that matters and that exists.
Michael Tracey: Yeah, clearly the presumption on their part is that if they're going to deride the show no matter what – now, I think 87.6 million is a bit inflated of a number that would make the viewership of the Tucker debut on Twitter a notch below the Super Bowl – but regardless, there is the potential for this kind of broadcasting methodology to gain traction, and that would be a threat to the established interests of people who run these media institutions. I don't know if that's the exact kind of causal motivator for why they're going out of their way to just blindly spew the same kind of ridicule that they always did. But there you have it.
Insofar as the content that Tucker touched upon in that monologue, it's true that he went fairly. – he took a hard line on Ukraine in a way that you wouldn't see virtually anywhere else in the media. But that was also roughly the case when he was at Fox. I mean, just a month or so after the invasion started, I happened to be in Poland doing reporting and I had to be on the show and not to touch that. But he helped confirm me. And Tucker's position was ‘help me confirm a story with the Pentagon.’ They got confirmation from the Pentagon that the Pentagon had imposed a gag order on all U.S. military personnel in Poland to prohibit them from speaking to the media because they didn't want any information to be publicized as to their activities right across the border from Ukraine and Poland. And that was at a time when there was even more of an intractable consensus around the Ukraine issue and deviating from that consensus was even more probably of a risky move. So, I think that's actually what's admirable about Tucker if you want to kind of find a way to praise him, is that what he said in the monologue, that was relatively almost entirely, I would say, consistent with what you might have expected him to say on Fox. In other words, he's not kind of dramatically modifying what he's saying based on the medium or the audience, which I would contend is actually a marker of intellectual consistency.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, I think and, you know, it's very hard to say because we're talking about subtleties and gradations, but I think when you have 10 minutes and you pack in not just a news story about Ukraine and you don't hear skepticism, but you pretty much say we're being lied to – it's not that we don't know; it's almost certainly the case that it was Ukrainians, not Russians, that did that. And then you got to just throw in for good measure what happened on 9/11 and where did Jeffrey Epstein get his money and how did Jeffrey Epstein die? And what about those UFOs? You're pretty much staking a position in the ground where you're saying this show is going to be very unflinching in its refusal to accept as good faith or reliable the claims about anything that comes from the leading institutions we're told to trust, even going so far as to question the narrative about 9/11 and Jeffrey Epstein. So, I think you can point to times in his show where he did talk about Jeffrey Epstein skeptically, the claim that he committed suicide.
Michael Tracey: Yeah He talked about all those issues.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, absolutely.
Michael Tracey: Other than 9/11, which I'm not sure yet.
G. Greenwald: Not 9/11. And I think the way that he packed it all in and used very like –even this language about Zelenskiy, you know, being like rat-faced and sweaty and Lindsey Graham having an attraction to him. I think a lot of this stuff is maybe just a slightly more unleashed version of Tucker as compared to how he was on Fox. So, I agree with you. You know, I said you can't really prove it. It's one show, it's 10 minutes. But to me, having heard Tucker talk about these things a lot on the air, this seems a little bit more aggressive. And I would hope that he would because he doesn't have to be [...]
Michael Tracey: Yeah, and maybe I should retract my statement. It was probably a bit more audacious than you might expect from just a typical broadcast of the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox. Not that I was a regular viewer and I sat around watching it all day, but to the extent that was familiar with the contents, this would strike me as probably a bit more audacious. And I think maybe one way to think about it is, even if it's not a deliberate kind of substantive modification of one's content, if you're on the 8 p.m. slot on Fox News each night, you have to be mindful – or you inevitably are going to be mindful – that a huge segment of your audience is just going to kind of default FOX viewers who haven't actively sought you out personally and maybe don't watch your content or consume what you say because they have a particular ideological affinity with you. They just have made a habit of watching Fox, including at your hour. Maybe they like you incidentally, but it's not like they're actively seeking you out. Whereas if you're not speaking to an audience that has in a much greater sense sought you out directly because they're going onto Twitter, they're taking certain steps that they wouldn't have taken if they were just consuming passively your show on Fox, then maybe there is a bit more of a latitude that you have to be totally sort of unrestrained in what you put out there.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, well, I think there are two other aspects to this, which is that –I'm getting back to personal experience here – so, one is and I alluded to this earlier, when you are attached to a media corporation or a news organization that has corporate bosses and senior editors and you have a bunch of colleagues, and especially when you're kind of one of the leading faces of it, the way Tucker was with Fox, the way I was when I was at The Intercept, there is a kind of subliminal constraint or sort of constraint it imposes on you, which are not even really conscious, but you just always know that if you're going to go to a certain place that provokes a lot of controversies, that's going to affect not only you but the entire organization. And it could […]
Michael Tracey: It helps not know that.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, well, I'm saying it kind of gets embedded into your head so that even if you're not consciously interrogating that in that way, that it's […]
Michael Tracey: You are like a fish. It's literally the water you're swimming in like a fish.
G. Greenwald: Exactly. And so, once I left The Intercept, I realized how kind of liberated I was in ways that I wasn't even aware had been constrained to me before and I guarantee you that's going to happen way more so with Tucker, who was under a lot more pressure in terms of having this gigantic news corporation, and the Murdochs, hanging above his head. But the other thing I think that is almost certainly going to happen, and that's definitely happened to me, is when I got to The Intercept into the circumstance that I did and I realized that I had become victimized by this genuinely illiberal and repressive climate, it wasn't something I was describing any longer. It was something [that] had affected me negatively and restricted my ability to speak. You become a little bit more radicalized about just how corrupted these institutions are, and you want to – or you're able to – speak more clearly about them because you've now kind of personally experienced it. Tucker got fired despite being the most-watched show on that network, very abruptly and very suddenly, in a way, I'm certain he feels betrayed by and angry about and kind of thinks it is unjust. And that has to affect going forward how he speaks about a lot of these institutions, including media corporations.
Michael Tracey: Yeah, And I would think that what you also inevitably would have to sublimate is that there's a ton of money that is invested in your position in the institution. So, it's not just you on the line that requires you to maybe stay within the confines of a certain set of expectations as to what content you're going to publicize or put out. In other words, it's not just your own interest that you have to be mindful of, and even financially, it's a whole conglomeration of people's interests that are dependent on you. And even if you put up guardrails to kind of insulate yourselves from whatever pressures or potential corrupting influences that present and you can be the most genuine person in the world in wanting to kind of prevent those influences from having any influence on you. It seems like it's just an inevitable fact of life that it suffuses your world in such a way that it's just impossible to fully do away with those influences.
G. Greenwald: Yeah. So, I don't know if you saw this news, but I want to get to the substance of the issue with Ukraine and who blew up the dam, which was the topic of his monologue and then something I want to go over with you. But just one last thing on this Tucker issue and Fox: people were a little confused when he said he was going to bring his show to Twitter because it wasn't necessarily the most natural place for him to go. And especially that was the case when it became clear that he had no contract with Twitter. Twitter's not paying him to be on Twitter. And the reason, as it turns out, is because Fox, his view of their relationship is that Fox has not terminated their contract with Tucker. He's still an employee of Fox News. According to Fox, he's still bound by his contract. They're still paying him under that contract. And it's a lot of money, $15 million to $20 million a year. So, if you're taking out $1.5 million, $2 million every single month that Fox pays to Tucker, every month, $1.5 million, and their view is, because he's still an employee of Fox, he is prohibited from going anywhere else and working for one of our competitors. So, I think the idea with Tucker was, well, I'm going to just go on Twitter, I have no contract, nobody can say that I've taken a job at CNN or even Rumble, I'm not competing with Fox, I'm just speaking out on Twitter the way anybody else uses social media to speak out on. There's no way they can interpret that as breaching my contract or trying to silence me there. And yet, right before we were on the air, Axios reported that Fox News regards Tucker Carlson as in breach of his contract as a result of him doing a show on Twitter, even though he's not being paid by Twitter, not making any money. Their view is that for the duration of the contract, which is through 2025, apparently, he's barred from being heard publicly in any way, even on social media. And I have to think there's something ideological about that, that Fox is trying to realign the Republican Party with the old-school establishment ideology that it had always been attached to – all this time the Murdochs were promoting it until Donald Trump came along – and they see Tucker as this hardcore establishment, the anti-establishment voice, who in some ways seems so ideologically threatening to the Republican Party and to the Fox News executives who are now trying to kind of have a rapprochement with the Republican Party, that they want to use this contract to silence him entirely. Don't you find that very strange?
Michael Tracey: Yeah. I mean, I guess it would depend on the actual wording of the relevant clause in the contract, but it would be strange to say that Twitter was one of the competitors that the drafters of the contract had in mind when they inserted that clause prohibiting Tucker from going on the platform of a competitor to Fox. If anything, Twitter is a supplement to Fox in that Fox, just like every other media outlet, uses Twitter to promote their content and they cite Twitter in their content on broadcast and so forth. So, it's interesting to see how that argument hashes out. But yeah, I mean, I guess this does potentially lend itself to the theory that there is more of an ideological motivator that maybe some had suspected when he was fired. That was a popular theory initially that I was a bit more skeptical of, just insofar, given the ambiguities of the circumstances of the firing, it seemed to me that there was probably kind of a more banal explanation that was ultimately at play for it. And the ideological explanation might have been a bit more sort of emotionally satisfying, I didn't see a whole lot of evidence for it, given that, like just as I said before, Tucker was going even more against the grain, given the political climate at the time, last year, a year ago, than it would have been in April. So, it just didn't add up to me. But, you know, I have to be open to evidence. And if it's established or if there's an accumulation of evidence that they are seeking to just prevent him from engaging on the public platform at all, even if it couldn't really be conceivably argued to be in breach of that contract – they're still trying to make that argument. I don't know. I guess it's possible but, at the same time, I do think that these corporate lawyers are pretty vengeful. So even if they have to stretch the argument to claim that Twitter's a competitor, maybe they just want to do it just to test their own ability to enforce the law.
G. Greenwald: I think Fox has clearly lost a lot by getting rid of Tucker. I mean, you can see it in the ratings. Did you see it? They used to get 3 million viewers a night starting at 8 p. m., and then it would kind of go down a little bit, but not much. And now they start off with one and a half million. They apparently are ahead of MSNBC ever since Tucker's firing. They're kind of, you know, really brought down a huge peg. And I would think the last thing Fox would want to do, having angered their viewership to this extent by firing Tucker, is now going to war against him in a way that seems very vindictive unless there's a real ideological motive. And I think this has been so overlooked because the liberal wing of the corporate media has been incapable of understanding this. I think they hate Tucker and his show without really watching it. It is a very unusual situation to have such radically different agendas from the 8 p.m. show in primetime on Fox to the 9 p.m. show with the second biggest star on Fox, Sean Hannity, where, you know, Sean Hannity is doing what he's always done, which is kissing the ass of every Republican Party leader, cheering on the war in Ukraine, calling everybody a traitor and a Kremlin agent who's against it. And you have Tucker, who is probably the leading voice of everything Sean Hannity is criticizing. The Murdochs clearly have a political agenda. There are politicians they support, there are ideologies that they hate and they like, and to have such a radical split between your two biggest hosts is pretty much unsustainable unless you're only running Fox News as a business and not as a political project. But I don't think anyone has ever thought of the Murdochs as just apolitical, profit-mongers. I mean, they clearly have a political agenda, and I think a political agenda is tied to the establishment in the Republican Party, and they very much want Trump not to be the standard bearer of the Republican Party any longer. And I think they see […]
Michael Tracey: That as although Trump was on Hannity show again this week. I mean, it's not as though that Trump has been banished from Fox. If anything, Hannity is solidifying his ties with Trump.
(Voices overlap)
G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean […]
Michael Tracey: […] the election clearly […]
G. Greenwald: […] Has come to their senses on. I mean, they clearly want to elevate DeSantis. I think like, I mean, at the end of the day, they fired Tucker and hired Sean Hannity.
Michael Tracey: […] Trump is going on the daily every week for a very friendly and lovable town hall.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, but at the end of the day, Michael, they did fire Tucker and they did not fire Sean Hannity. And he's there are reports now that Laura Ingraham, the only other voice on there who's really an opponent of the war in Ukraine is also on her way out or at least leaving the primetime lineup. You know at some point the proof is in the pudding about who they like and who they don't. And all of these people are doing fine in the ratings. The thing that differentiates them is their ideological disposition. And it's hard not to believe that that wasn't a factor at all, given how these decisions seem to align with that.
Michael Tracey: No, I think that could probably have been a factor. Don't really know how Trump himself factors into that, because there was hardly a bigger and more devoted booster of Trump throughout Trump's presidency than Sean Hannity. Again, as I said. Sean Hannity appeared at campaign events on stage with Trump and campaigned with him actively. So, I just don't know how.
(Voices overlap)
G. Greenwald: But that’s right that was the standard bearer of the Republican party that Trump […]
Michael Tracey: That they're trying to get rid of Trump.
G. Greenwald: No, but that's because Trump was the standard bearer of the Republican Party. There was no way to go against Trump and keep a Republican Party audience. You couldn't be openly opposed to Trump and during the Trump years, or even during the campaign, I mean, he dominated the campaign and then became the Republican Party nominee and then was the president. So, Sean Hannity was doing what he always does, which is sycophanticly hug whoever the standard bearer of the Republican Party is, I think remains to be seen what Fox's posture is, what Sean Hannity's posture is to run DeSantis […]
(Voices overlap)
Michael Tracey: Certainly not, he’s doing the same thing last week with Trump.
G. Greenwald: Yeah […]
Michael Tracey: As I just told you, Trump was on Hannity Show.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, sure. And Hannity is never going to be openly hostile to Trump. But I think Fox and the network are clearly aligning themselves more with the establishment wing of the Republican Party. And that is where all the establishment is going, behind Ron DeSantis. All the money that was behind Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush in 2016 is now going to Ron DeSantis. And even though DeSantis has to position himself as this kind of anti-establishment figure, I think most people in the establishment see him as their best choice for sinking Trump. And I think Fox is on that side, they do not want Trump to be the ongoing leader of the Republican Party and Tucker Carlson was the single most effective advocate of populist, anti-establishment politics within the Republican Party, a much better advocate even than Trump. And now he's out there and they're trying to keep him silent, even away from Fox. And I think the evidence is pretty compelling that that's part of the reason.
Michael Tracey: Well, I think you're wrong in that DeSantis most certainly is anti-establishment. I mean, if the establishment is woke excess on college campus. Then, you know, I had never seen anybody who's more anti-establishment […]
G. Greenwald: Right. Super exciting […]
Michael Tracey: That's the emblem of the establishment. It's just, you know, college kids doing stupid stuff. I know that can be a legitimate story at times. But like, if your entire political persona is built around combating that particular scourge and nothing else, then it's amazing to now try to cast that as “anti-establishment" as other art factions of the establishment that are “anti-woke.” Maybe they have been stifled somewhat in the past few years, but to kind of make it.
G. Greenwald: At the end of the day, nothing serves the establishment’s interests more than keeping everybody focused on the culture war. Because when you’re focusing on the culture war, I'm not saying it's unimportant, it means you're not focused on how financial power, how corporate power, how intelligence and military agencies continue to dominate Washington. It only focuses on things like, you know, the trans issue to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. That's a very good way to like kind of rile people up and make them think they're doing something radical. But in reality, staying away from establishment powers.
(Voices overlap)
Michael Tracey: Yeah, true anti-establishment [...]
G. Greenwald: It’s why it’s so popular on the left [...]
Michael Tracey: 24/7 [...]
G. Greenwald: It is the only thing people on the left are left with [...]
Michael Tracey: 24/7 on this transition and nothing else […]
G. Greenwald: Totally, totally. There are people on the left, the same way they know they can't challenge and don't want to challenge any establishment orthodoxy. So fighting Republicans on trans issues […]
Michael Tracey: They don't care about anything else.
