You’d think MSNBC frontwoman Rachel Maddow would absolutely loathe Fox News poster boy Tucker Carlson. One is a progressive journalist who presents fact-based, heavily-researched news segments intent on educating viewers, the other just suggested on national TV that we rename Monkeypox “Schlong Covid.” Clearly, these two TV personalities are not the same.
But, surprisingly, Maddow has nothing but nice things to say about her former boss who used to have his own show on MSNBC before he jumped ship to spew nonsense about the benefits of “testicle tanning” to throngs of Trump supporters. In fact, in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Maddow complemented her political rival on his show’s ratings success.
“Tucker’s doing great right now,” Maddow told the magazine. “Look at Tucker’s career. The first show I worked on was his 11 o’clock show on MSNBC that nobody remembers. But he was always kicking around the business and has always been talented. It just — this turned out to be his moment.”
Maddow doesn’t mention how Tucker decided to blame women for the rise in mass shootings committed by men. Maddow went on to praise Carlson’s ability to stand out in a crowded news landscape, comparing watching him host to watching a *checks notes* professional baseball player … baseball?
“It doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate whatever they’re doing in terms of, you know, where they put their shortstop in order to give them a better defense. There’s a sort of, like, respecting the game, in terms of people who are doing well and people who are good at it,” she continued.
Of course, she also took a second to recognize how dangerous Carlson’s rhetoric is, but even then, she found a way to compliment him When Vanity Fair quizzed Maddow on a New York Times piece that investigated his style of “reporting,” Maddow seemed to brush over the effects that Carlson’s devoted airtime to ridiculous conspiracy theories have on his viewers.
“More than the issue of, you know, how dangerous are Tucker’s ideas, and how do they interact with the growth of the authoritarian right in the Republican Party — more so than that question, which is obviously what the central thrust of the reporting was about, I was interested in how they deconstructed why it works.”
It’s a take, alright.
(Via Vanity Fair)
(@BritneyTheStan) 
