Glenn Greenwald’s lucid denunciation of Fox News’ sordid maneuvers to gag Tucker Carlson under penalty of law and pocketbook. Tucker has become a meteoric figure in America’s media firmament, raking in more millions of viewers for a single show than anyone else before. This is making the establishment very nervous. In this post we also resent Tucker’s latest broadside (Episode 4). If you watch it, you’ll quickly understand what the fuss and agitation is all about.
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GLENN GREENWALD—It is really hard to overstate how consequential and how nefarious this disinformation industry is. It received woefully inadequate attention until the emergence of these articles. It is one of the greatest threats to a free Internet yet manufactured. It is rapidly spreading as a result of the backing of some of the world’s most powerful governments and most influential neo-liberal billionaires. And without hyperbole or melodrama, its goal is nothing less than the end of the Internet as one of our last instruments for expressing and organizing meaningful dissent.
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—Jonathan Cook, Glenn Greenwald and others have said all that needs saying about Tucker Carlson’s fate at Fox News. I am interested in this primarily as a case of journalist-on-journalist crime. This is not a right-left question, either. It is a question of independent thinking and dissenting perspectives and those who are fully on now for suppressing both. Tucker Carlson’s is a high-profile case and is complicated by Fox News’s place among corporate-owned media. Let us consider other developments that give us a fuller picture of what amounts to an intensifying war for control of “the narrative” and, at the horizon, our minds.
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JIMMY DORE SHOW—A few weeks before Tucker Carlson was fired, Rupert Murdoch reportedly spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It’s not clear what Zelensky said, but it’s been well established that the Ukrainian government objected to Carlson’s opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine in the war with Russia. Guest host Aaron Maté and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss whether Zelensky had an impact on the Fox News network’s decision to jettison Carlson.
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Tucker Carlson’s firing has sparked debate about the implications for actual free speech on the current regime, or similar oligarchic admins that may follow. It is important to consider the political and cultural fallout from this event in order to understand the impact it will have on our society and the freedom of expression we are supposedly entitled to.
