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MSM CYA as Carlson and Lemon get fired and Irony is everything [1]

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Date: 2023-04-24  

Ruling class mouthpieces come in all flavors, whether it’s trust-fund babies or acceptable intersectional characters. Markets for on-air personalities cleared slightly on Monday, but the MSM is a cartel and whatever replaces Tucker Carlson in his timeslot will surely have even less personality and ideological consistency. Don Lemon’s exit was waiting for such a covering event. Whether bottom line or front end, revenues and ratings will out.

If there’s one thing to say about Tucker Carlson’s abrupt termination from Fox News on Monday, it’s that it’s funny. It’s funny because Carlson is a singularly unsympathetic figure, a preppy, blue-blooded brat who has spent the most recent period of his career cosplaying as a voice for “forgotten Americans.” It’s funny because Carlson is a mendacious fraud who has used his perch at Fox News and his status as the host of America’s most watched news show to spew an unending spray of hateful bile to his audience of terrified septu- and octogenarians.

It’s funny because Carlson himself loved nothing more than to mock journalists—real ones, not the ones like him, who only played them on TV—when they lost their jobs. (When hundreds of my colleagues across the academy got laid off in 2019, Carlson told them to learn to code—I can only hope he’s signing up for Codeacademy at his compound in Maine right now.) It’s funny because now Carlson has gotten fired from MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, which is I suppose a kind of accomplishment. It’s funny because we’re in the middle of season four of Succession. Sometimes, timing is everything.

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And so, for now at least, we’re left to reckon with Carlson’s time at Fox News. He was, to be fair, someone who did have agenda-setting power within the post-Trump American right. But it’s still unclear how much power he actually had—which is one question that will be tested now that he’s out there on his own, without the Fox News rating machine humming along behind him. This is ultimately the funniest thing about Carlson’s exit from Fox News. He thought he was bigger and more powerful than the network. He thought he could do whatever he wanted. Instead, he got yet another reminder—the latest in a long stretch of them throughout his career—that maybe he’s just really not that special.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/24/2165663/-MSM-CYA-as-Carlson-and-Lemon-get-fired-and-Irony-is-everything

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