Need One More Reason to Dislike Tucker Carlson? (Part 2)
The fine line between Satire and Bullshit
To recap: Last week, in Part 1 of this post, we considered two things. One, how satire criticizes, distorts, entertains, and assumes a posture of Us versus Them in an effort to persuade a contemporary audience to trust and come to believe in the worldview of the satirist. Two, how Stephen Colbert deploys the apparatuses of satire to accomplish his persuasive tasks of blame and praise.
In particular, Colbert dexterously invades another genre (a Fox News show) and manipulates his satiric persona (pretending to be a conservative bullhorn like Bill O’Reilly) as a means to amplify his satiric messaging as well as establish an intense transactive relationship with his audience (that is, the “Colbert Nation” is fully in on the joke of his mocking Fox and O’Reilly).
Likewise, this week in Part 2 of the post, we’ll consider two things. One, how Tucker Carlson adopts rhetorical tactics very similar to Colbert’s—not in the name of satiric argumentation but for the purposes of rightwing indoctrination. Two, how Tucker Carlson is full of bullshit and never wants his audience to know it.
Applying this bit of cultural theory (continued from last week...)
An overwhelming amount of video exists online of Tucker Carlson saying incendiary, belligerent, and odious things—a lot of them total nonsense. (For example, see Carlson’s cutting-edge exposé about publicly pooping Pennsylvania gypsies in 2017, here and here.) You can browse his material at your displeasure.
For our purposes, we’ll take a look at an April 2023 article by Tori Otten in The New Republic titled “The 10 Most Fascist Things Tucker Carlson Said on Air” (here). Otten provides brief video clips for most of these fascist moments by Carlson. Below I’ll ask you, please, to watch several of these clips. In them, look for the core characteristics of satire, as explained in Part 1 of this post, being used by Carlson as a way to articulate blame and praise vis-á-vis hot-button social and political issues of the day.
In particular, watch for how Carlson implements the specific satiric techniques of manipulating his persona and genre invasion as a way to create a mindset of Us versus Them in his intended audience.
Finally, for a bit of fun, in your mind’s eye replace Carlson with the satiric persona of Stephen Colbert speaking the same talking points and conducting the same interviews. How might that change the message being delivered in these clips?
Let’s get to it.
Please watch Otten’s Fascist Thing #2: “He said Vladimir Putin wasn’t so bad.”
In this clip, Carlson wears the persona of the good, honest man (vir bonus) as practiced by the Roman satirist, Horace. Carlson does his best to appear as a reasonable man merely asking, as he puts it, “fair questions.” His vibe is one of innocent, gee-just-wondering. He cultivates something of a boyish—well, frat-boyish—air with his slightly shaggy hair and feel, maybe, that his mother is forcing him to wear a suit and tie. His likeability puts us off our guard as to what he’s actually saying—that there’s nothing objectionable about Putin. Carlson also uses misdirection and exaggeration as rhetorical devices by focusing our attention, instead, on a litany of wild questions.
Moreover, because Carlson comes to us on a much-watched “news” show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, the trappings and authority of an informed expert surround him. The medium itself is designed to imbue Carlson with credibility. The trouble is, of course, that every question he raises, seemingly innocuously, harbors malicious disinformation.
For example, the suggestions that China manufactured “a world-wide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years” or that American educators are “teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination” or that liberals are “trying to snuff out Christianity” are, in fact, a mere scattershot of rightwing targets and bugbears. None of Carlson’s distortions is accurate—let alone a “fair question” deserving the common-sense answer of “No.”
This situation, then, begs a big question: Isn’t Carlson invading the genre of a legitimate news program every bit as much as Colbert invades the genre of a legitimate news program?
Carlson’s pundit persona on Tucker Carlson Tonight functions to mask his lies; Colbert’s satiric persona on The Colbert Report functions to unmask the lies of others. If, in this clip, we were to substitute in Colbert for Carlson asking the same list of questions, wouldn’t Colbert’s performance produce the reverse effect? That is, not to exonerate Putin but to condemn him via satiric hyperbole.
Please watch Otten’s Fascist Thing #3: “He said the desire to procreate has been ‘subverted’ by birth control and abortion” and Thing #4: “He complained about ‘the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men.’”
In both of these clips, we’re presented with the pretense of a serious, informative interview. Along with invading the overall genre of a legitimate news program, Carlson here invades a standard segment of actual news programs, namely, an in-depth interview with an expert in a field.
In Thing #3, the ostensible expert is none other than Elon Musk. Although he impressively uses the term “limbic system,” what expertise can Musk claim in the fields of, say, sociology or reproductive medicine? That he makes overpriced cars? That he abuses employees? That he has no idea what free speech means? That he blows up his toy space rockets? Yet there’s Carlson, performing the role of good, honest journalistic interviewer sincerely asking seemingly significant questions.
While Musk natters on about contraception and abortion toppling civilization itself—“hey...if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers...then civilization is going to crumble”—Carlson nods in thoughtful consideration of Musk’s mind-blowing wisdom bombs. Carlson’s visual charade, of course, is a signal to his audience to heed the erudition being presented to them. Meanwhile, what’s really being peddled to viewers is the dog whistling of two white supremacist, put-women-back-in-their-place frat boys.
In Thing #4, Carlson enacts the same interview pantomime, this time the ostensible authority figure, Andrew McGovern, being credentialed as a “Fitness Professional.” (Sidebar: WTF?) Like Musk, McGovern drops in some sciencey-sounding jargon— “bromeopathy”—to establish his bona fides. (At least Musk’s term is a real thing.) This leading specialist in the Fitness Professional subfield of, one supposes, Testosterone Disaster Studies is being interviewed on Fox News because he’s found the solution to the looming U.S. testicular crisis (that no one has ever heard of before). The cure? Something called “red light therapy.” A treatment, claims McGovern, that has “mass amounts of benefits” based on “so much data out there.”
In a nutshell (pun very much intended), what McGovern advocates for is irradiating all red-white-and-blue testicles before it’s too late—before the rapidly crashing testosterone levels in American men has plummeted to zero. (Sidebar: Oh, I would pay very good money to watch Colbert interview this guy.)
For this interview, Carlson expands his newsman persona schtick a tad. While still performing basically as an amiable and thoughtful listener, Carlson throws in a rhetorical trope known as an adversarius. This is when, for the sake of advancing your argument, you voice the opinion of someone who disagrees with you. It’s a straw man tactic frequently used in satire. Carlson’s use of the device is tame. He points out to McGovern how “half the viewers” might have doubts about the “crazy” idea of “testicle tanning.” But in the same breath Carlson makes it very clear that such skepticism is unfounded. After all, he’s interviewing an expert who says otherwise!
What are the actual messages of this faux interview? More whining about American men being emasculated by, one guesses, feminazis and the general liberal mob. Tossed in as well is a healthy dose of mistrust for “mainstream” expertise—you know, knowledge gained by people who have studied real things long and hard with the result being that they actually know what they’re talking about.
McGovern complains that all the wonderful data showing the benefits of subjecting one’s testicles to red light is being ignored by the closed-minded medical and scientific community. He also asserts (on what evidence isn’t clear, but who the hell needs evidence?) that, “there’s a lot of people out there right now that...don’t trust the mainstream information.” In other words, dear viewers of Tucker Carlson Tonight, trust instead the real experts: your intrepid news host and this guy who obviously lifts a lot of weights.
Please watch Otten’s Fascist Thing #5: “He said white supremacy is not a real problem” and Thing #8: “He called for an insurrection after Trump was indicted.”
In the video clips we’ve considered so far, Carlson wears the persona of the Horatian good, honest man as a stylistic tool to induce viewers to be open to his messages. Another standard satiric persona to employ, however, is that of the irate, indignant man (vir iratus). The satirist Juvenal famously uses such a narrator in many of his diatribes directed against Roman society of late first and early second century CE.
The performance is just as it sounds. To pull in your audience, adjust your persona to appear affronted and infuriated by the utter stupidity and abject criminality of those you blame. Bring viewers into the fold of your moral outrage and principled abhorrence. Signal that the beliefs and behaviors of your enemies are, without question, beyond toleration.
While Carlson seems to prefer the Horatian narrator, he’s perfectly capable of toggling into Juvenalian mode on demand. In Thing #5, for example, when denying the existence of white supremacy in America, Carlson doesn’t exactly fly off the handle, but he does get fittingly testy. He uses a gruff, mocking tone to voice the liberal claims that “white supremacy” poses “the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland.” Carlson scowls with an apt little pouty face, too, at the appropriate moments. Mommy’s little frat-boy is clearly upset. His playacting signals to viewers just how very upset they should be as well.
Carlson uses the same tactic in Thing #8 when characterizing Trump’s indictment by Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, as “a political purge” rather than the result of possible wrongdoing by the ex-president. Again, Carlson doesn’t start foaming at the mouth like Rush Limbaugh used to do. But he does get suitably prickly when naming egregious crimes liberals are allowed to get away with while a poor innocent like Trump suffers unjust prosecution. All right-thinking people, after all, must grow irate and indignant when hearing how “Trans Biden voters can execute Christian children” with impunity.
So what?
The great difference between what Stephen Colbert does on The Colbert Report and what Tucker Carlson does on Tucker Carlson Tonight lies in their respective relationships to the audience. A crucial feature of satire is that, at some point, it makes the viewer or reader aware of the rhetoric in play. Satire exposes its own satirical construct and trickery that’s afoot.
Otherwise, the satirist risks the messages of the satire not landing as intended. The audience knows that Colbert is pretending to be a rightwing pundit—and so the audience knows that pretty much everything Colbert says in his satiric persona needs to be taken in the opposite way. So, no, Colbert does not worship Bill O’Reilly. Just the opposite. Duh.
Carlson’s relationship to his audience is the reverse. Unlike Colbert, Carlson (and O’Reilly and Fox News) never wants his viewers to recognize the rhetoric he uses to sway them. They are kept intentionally in the dark about those inveigling devices. Whereas satire seeks to create a partnership with its audience, Carlson and Fox are only interested in establishing a monologue at its audience. A monologue that is hellbent on feeding viewers disinformation in order to instill in them fear, hatred, ignorance, paranoia, and violence.
On The Colbert Report, Colbert famously coins a Word for this activity: Truthiness (here). It’s the practice of not thinking with your head, but knowing with your heart. Accordingly, in his role as a conservative pundit, Colbert declares: “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.”
Truthiness describes perfectly the broadcasting techniques of Tucker Carlson and of Fox. Another term likewise comes to mind: Bullshit.
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in a 1986 treatise enticingly titled “On Bullshit” (here), sets out to define the phenomenon. He finds that a liar is most concerned with hiding the fact that he is attempting to lead us away from the truth. A bullshitter, differently, is most concerned with hiding that “the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it.” Frankfurt sums up his subject matter thus:
For the bullshitter...all...bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
Again, a perfect description of the “news” being reported by Tucker Carlson and by Fox. It is not news reporting at all, but a jumble of factual and nonfactual material woven together to push their agenda of bullshit. Such bullshit is exactly what Jon Stewart warns us against in his farewell speech on The Daily Show (here). After 16 seasons of satirizing bamboozlers of many kinds, Stewart encourages us to stay on our toes: “The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.”
The progressive satire of Stewart and Colbert enacts bullshit in order to expose bullshit. Their aim is to open eyes and stimulate critical minds.
The conservative punditry of Carlson and Fox bullshits in order to propagate bullshit. Their aim is to close eyes and enrage unthinking hearts.
The satire of Stewart and Colbert fights rightwing power. The bullshit of Carlson and Fox is paid for by rightwing power. The only similarity between these undertakings is that both involve “fake news” programs.
The satire candidly so. The punditry covertly so.
And let’s not overlook the most important “so what?” of all. Since the 1990s, this brand of bullshit steadily has been shifting the political and social landscape of America. It put a Bullshitter-in-Chief in the White House. It packs into statehouses and Congress legislators with bullshit between their ears and pouring from their mouths. It overturned Roe v. Wade. It stormed the Capitol on January 6th. It accounts for the lion’s share of mass shootings in America (here).
And now Tucker is joining his bro, Elon, on Twitter (here).
Derisible, but not funny.