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Thursday, June 8, 2023
Newsmax Columnists Fret Over Tucker Carlson's Firing, Hope Newsmax Benefits
Topic: Newsmax

We've shown how Newsmax flip-flopped on Tucker Carlson, going from bashing him over his pro-Russia stance to treating him as a victim after Fox News fired him (in part because it would desperately love to hire Carlson). Newsma 's columnists also fretted over Carlson's firing. Michael Dorstewitz declaring that his firing was "bad for all of society" in an April 26 column:

The release of Tucker Carlson from Fox News, coming one week after conservative political commentator Dan Bongino was also let go, represents a disturbing and evolving trend in American society: freedom of thought is out; totalitarianism is in.

[...]

Afterwards, dressed in what appeared to be the same jacket and tie, Carlson delivered the keynote address at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary Gala. He talked about freedom.

"I am not a slave," he said. "I am a free citizen, and I'm not doing that, and there's nothing you can do to me to make me do it, and I hope it won't come to that, but if it does come to that, here I am. Here I am. It's Paul on trial. Here I am."

Carlson also spoke about truth and lies.

"The truth is contagious," he said. "the more you tell the truth, the stronger you become. . . .the more you lie, the weaker and more terrified you become . . . you see these people and some of them really have paid a heavy price for telling the truth . . . but they do it anyway. . . "

Dorstewitz didn't mention that Carlson's record of spreading falsehoods and misinformation is so egregious that Fox News lawyers resorted to defending him against him by declaring that nobody should believe a single word he says.

Bill Donohue whined that the media is accurately labeling Carlson's views:

Today, these terms have lost their meaning. The lead story in today's New York Times is: "Fox News Ousts Carlson, a Voice Of the Far Right."

What did Carlson do to merit this invidious tag? The news story says he took "far-right positions on issues like border policy and race relations."

Carlson believes that people who break the law by crashing our border and entering the country illegally should be prosecuted. The surveys show so do most Americans.

Carlson also believes that critical race theory, which teaches that every white person is a racist, is irresponsible. The surveys show most Americans agree with him. In other words, according to the New York Times, most Americans are Nazi-like creatures.

Most fair-minded observers would say that Carlson is to the right of center the way Don Lemon is to the left of center. Accordingly, if The New York Times were fair, it would brand Lemon "far left." But that is not what they called him recently: He is called a "fiery political commentator."

This could also be said of Carlson, but that is not what they say about him. He is an extremist.

Donohue offered no proof that Lemon is as far left as Carlson is to the right.

John Burnett argued that Carlson's firing is good news ... for Newsmax, because Fox News has decided it would rather "dominate the political center, which requires it not to be too far right to capture Democrats and independents":

So, where do the defecting 3.7 million center-right Fox viewers go? Newsmax is the optimal choice, and the network is well-positioned to gain viewers, streamers, and subscribers requesting the station in cable network channel packages.

And the timing is excellent for Newsmax, having recently resolved its dispute with DirecTV as we enter a period of presidential politics that will yield more campaign announcements and Republican debates set to kick off in August this year.

The floridly bylined Tamar Alexia Fleishman, Esq., thinks that Carlson's firing means that Fox News will not support Donald Trump in 2024:

The ignominious firing of a top performer — often the No. 1 show on cable — seemed to strike a chord across America. But as his audience was generally only about 1% of the U.S. population and so many of us already switched to Newsmax, there was something incongruous about the collective reaction. It felt more like a death in the family, even if it was someone you didn’t see too often.

Why? Carlson was one person in the mainstream media who dared to look at things in a different way, even if sometimes utterly unpopular.

Whether you agreed or not, he articulated a certain point of view. This was generally the America First, MAGA lens: on the topics of the vaccine, Ukraine, immigration or President Trump, he was not milquetoast.

Paradoxically, the more popular he became, it appears the more he rubbed Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch the wrong way. Murdoch, a billionaire born in Australia, doesn’t have a natural love for the viewers. The audience is a necessary evil for him to deal with: Grab their money and use their numbers to wield disproportionate power.

What did he want to do with his power? Clearly, Murdoch expects to use it to prevent Donald Trump from being president again. If Murdoch can create a news blackout, there goes the “earned media” that was part of the secret sauce for Trump’s first victory.

It should make every thinking American shudder to envision himself as a mere pawn of Rupert Murdoch. He can never be president himself.

[...]

We cannot allow the Murdochs to silence us, or trample our will.

Josh Hammer insisted that Carlson needs a massive platform again to hate transgender people:

Hopefully, Carlson will retain something approximating his exceptional level of cultural and political influence in whatever role he next serves, because his witness to truth and civilizational sanity has never been more necessary.

This is perhaps most clearly true when it comes to gender ideology and transgenderism, which is the issue most directly implicated by Carlson's framing of America's fundamental divide as a struggle between differing theological and anthropological conceptions of man.

Is sexual dimorphism an obvious empirical reality, rooted in Genesis 1:27, and mandating legal codification for any regime that claims a basis in truth and justice? Or is gender instead "fluid," wherein man can replace God and change his gender on a lark, and wherein it is contemptible bigotry to deny anyone's subjective sense of biological or sexual reality?

Tucker Carlson certainly knew his answer: He opened a memorable 2021 interview of former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson by asking the then-sitting governor, who had shamefully vetoed a bill to protect vulnerable children from the predatory scalpels of the woke-besotted medical establishment, why he had "come out publicly as 'pro-choice' on the question of chemical castration of children." Oof.

That is not a debate where the "best white paper wins." It is a zero-sum contestation of clashing visions of the human person, rooted in diametrically opposed substantive underpinnings. And, more to the point, the forces of godlessness, paganism and civilizational arson certainly already treat the debate over gender ideology as a vicious winner-take-all battle.

Dennis Kneale also mined a pro-Newsmax angle to Carlson's firing in his May 1 column, in which he also touted three previous Newsmax appearances by him in the span of just a few paragraphs:

Tucker Carlson's ouster is downright rude; it had to hurt, as I mentioned on Rita Cosby’s show on Saturday morning on Newsmax TV, here.

One clear winner in this Tucker trauma has emerged, says veteran political advisor Dick Morris, whom I joined in a Newsmax segment on Monday of last week.

Morris declared:

"The obvious fact is that Newsmax has won. Newsmax is now the sole conservative voice in media, and Fox News can talk about that, but by firing Carlson they have decidedly moved to the left and the center."

He added, "I think ratings are going to increase dramatically, I think that people that are used to watching Fox are going to flock to Newsmax."

Good call.

Newsmax ratings were up 261% in the 8 p.m. slot, up 220% in prime time over all, and up 113% for total day, for Monday to Wednesday last week, compared with the two previous weeks. I discussed this with anchors Lidia Curanaj and Michael Grimm on Sunday morning on Newsmax's "Wake Up America Weekend."

Scott Powell's May 2 column took the doom-and-conspiracy route:

But there are profound lessons that have come to the fore via his departure from Fox, which reveal more nuance and depth about what's wrong with America’s mainstream media; that is, how it's influenced by America haters who manipulate advertisers to defund truth tellers, and how weak leadership of our media utterly fails our country and helps our enemies.

[...]

Tucker had the largest viewership of any talk show in the genre, and he was waking people up more effectively than any other "talking head."

But he was relentlessly attacked by left-wing critics who succeeded in intimidating advertisers from continuing their support of his show.

This may have been a factor in Fox management’s decision to cancel him.

Many have noted that Fox received advertising revenue from Pfizer.

Did that affect the network's coverage of an important and lasting story of our time: COVID-19 vaccines?

[...]

One can’t help but recognize that what makes Tucker Carlson so powerful is his God-given combination of compelling and disarming qualities of being an extraordinarily likeable truth teller. So, if that iron law is true, the best for Tucker Carlson must be yet to come.

And like an exceptional performance's encore, let’s bring him back, unleashed  — now.

But Fox News stopped liking him, and that's what matters at this point.


Posted by Terry K. at 6:28 PM EDT

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