One of the reasons that Tucker Carlson is successful at what he does is because of where he does it.
Carlson hosts a television show on a cable-news network that is deeply invested in his success. The New York Times’s recent exploration of Carlson’s influence and power at Fox News made clear the extent to which the network is focused on supporting his efforts. And given that his efforts (which sit on the “opinion” side of the network’s porous dividing line for its content) regularly roam into the domain of the exaggerated or fictional, that means that there’s little impetus for the network to hold him to account.
Consider the nature of television relative to other formats for a moment. When you read this article, for example, you can return to it, over and over. You can step back and reread the preceding paragraph, mull it over, consider it. You can read this whole article again in a week or a month. What I say can be easily challenged and debated.
With Carlson, that’s much harder. What he says is broadcast live — and then disappears into the past. His show re-airs at various times, and clips or transcripts sometimes pop up online. But not always. There’s no way for his audience to easily reconsider what he says. The age of the DVR makes that possible, yes, but not as easy as rereading this paragraph from the beginning. All this makes it much easier to say something untrue or incorrect — and then simply press forward. It’s not clear what Fox News’s policy on corrections is...
Djibouti hosts a US naval base called Camp Lemonnier, the only American military facility of its kind in Africa. Amid a fragile ceasefire in the Middle East war, a clip circulating in Ethiopia sho...