Dwain Northey (Gen X)

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news/index.html

As thrilled as I am that Tucker has parted ways with Fake News, sorry Fox, his departure in no way signals that the network will change its stripes. Carlson with all his winy accusatory questioning diatribes is only a cog in the disinformation machine.

Tucker Carlson only had in his prime-time slot starting 2016, the literal beginning of Donny Dumb Ass’s campaign for the office he held and attempted to destroy. In the excruciating 7 years he was an effective communicator of half truths and blatant bull shit and unfortunately far too many Americans’ tune into Fox. The sad truth is that when anyone is fed exclusively misinformation their grasp on reality is nearly permanently distorted. Carlson served his effectiveness, but his hubris caught up with him when he neglected to cover his tracks when admitting to the fact that he didn’t even believe his own bull shit.

I know prior to 2016 seems like a long time ago but does anyone remember who Carlson’s predecessor was? Bill O’Reilly who was the top-rated host in cable news was forced to resign after the disclosure of a series of sexual harassment allegations against him and an internal investigation that turned up even more. These contentious claims were embarrassing to Fox News and subsequently they forced him out.

Yes, one giant douche bag was replaced by a slightly less annoying more palatable version. O’Reilly in his hey day was the king of outrage and ‘conservative’ fury hurling trumped up accusations at the Obama White House.

According to the Daily Dot O’Reilly has 99 documented lies attributed to his time on air, here are the first 10.

1. O’Reilly bragged repeatedly he won two Peabody Awards hosting Inside Edition in the 90s. He won zero.
2. O’Reilly bragged that, woops, he actually had won a Polk Award hosting Inside Edition. He won zero of those, too. To be specific, the show did win that award—a year after O’Reilly stopped hosting.
3. O’Reilly then said he never claimed to have won a Peabody Award. He actually did make that claim, repeatedly, using the award as proof that Inside Edition was not a tabloid show but very good journalism. He later admitted to making the original Peabody claim, but now he just says the Peabody guys are unfair liberals.
4. Repeatedly claiming he’s “an average guy,” O’Reilly has claimed that he “came from nothing” and “you don’t come from any lower than I came from on the economic scale.” Actually, O’Reilly’s mother has repeatedly talked to the press about regular vacations the family took to Florida, that O’Reilly went to private school and college, and that they lived in an affluent New York suburb.
5. In 2006, O’Reilly boasted that he gets 6 million viewers every night. He got 2 million then. Today, he’s posting “huge numbers” because he’s addressing the Argentina controversy—so he’s getting about 3 million viewers on a night.
6. Responding to critics who say Fox News is too conservative, O’Reilly has long claimed to be a “normal guy” and a registered independent. It turned out, contradicting that claim, that he was a registered Republican.
7. He insisted that he is really an Independent and that when he registered to vote in 1994, there was no independent option and that he was “somehow assigned Republican status.” In 2004, comedian (now a senator) Al Franken went back and looked at O’Reilly’s voter registration form. Actually, there was an Independent option right next to the Republican box. O’Reilly had chosen Republican and then lied about it for the next decade on television.
8. NPR’s Mike Pesca reported O’Reilly’s political registration in 2001 on the radio. O’Reilly called it a “hatchet job” and said, “I’ve never heard of Mike Pesca.” Pesca had interviewed O’Reilly on tape for an hour for the report.
9. In 2004, O’Reilly said Iraq was producing chemical weapons in the run up to the 2003 Iraq war. They were not.
10. O’Reilly said Al Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq even after the claims were widely disproven. They were not.

Why am I pointing out the O’Reilly was a lying douche because he was replaced by Trucker Carlson who is and was also a lying douche. This is the Fox model replace one with another, Carlson started out more palatable than O’Reilly but eventually turned out to be the same if not worse. Who is on deck, what smiling purveyor of bull shit will Rupert Murdock anoint with his scepter of hypocrisy? Time will only tell but if the successor is true to form, we can bet that they will also turn out to be prolific purveyors of distorted truths and misinformation