CNN has made a habit of calling out Tucker Carlson in recent weeks. Jim Acosta has called Fox News the “bulls*it factory” and crowned Carlson its “employee of the month” along with its “chief white power correspondent.”
Lately, as Carlson ambles further into conspiracy theory territory about white erasure and the true identity of those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 at Donald Trump’s behest, the network and its employees have leveled more criticism at its competition. And over the weekend, it continued to call out Carlson by directly comparing him to another known conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones.
On Sunday, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy aired a segment on Reliable Sources that compared the things Carlson has said in recent weeks to Jones, tying the two together both with their wild statements and their embracing fringe beliefs despite the consequences of those theories becoming mainstream.
Tucker Carlson is Alex Jones. pic.twitter.com/W2xIMHhQI1
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) July 4, 2021
The segment is pretty damning, and it went viral on Twitter and drew a new level of criticism of both Carlson and Jones. And it went viral amid a Daily Beast report that called Fox News “poison” for America and included quotes from a former executive, Preston Padden, who reportedly pled with Rupert Murdoch to recognize the dangers of some Fox News programming.
Over the past nine months I have tried, with increasing bluntness, to get Rupert to understand the real damage that Fox News is doing to America. I failed, and it was arrogant and naïve to ever have thought that I could succeed. I am at a loss to understand why he will not change course. I can only guess that the destructive editorial policy of Fox News is driven by a deep-seated vein of anti-establishment/contrarian thinking in Rupert that, at age 90, is not going to change.
In other words, nothing is expected to change anytime soon. Even if CNN continues to frame Carlson and his network as radically as its rhetoric continues to be.