“Ask Tucker Carlson whatever happened to Tucker Carlson,” writes Lyz Lenz for the Columbia Journalism Review, “and he gets upset.”
Hmm. I guess some rich, white, male, conservative television hosts just don’t like being pigeonholed and belittled.
Ms. Lenz’s profile, entitled, “The mystery of Tucker Carlson,” details Carlson’s descent from apparent good guy to racist bad guy with 2.7 million viewers on Fox News and a conservative position on immigration.
How was he a good guy? Well, he once worked for CNN and MSNBC, and sometimes wrote articles that skewered Republicans. Side of the angels.
Now, however, he appears nightly as a new Grand Wizard.
“If you look at a lot of his early writings,” Lenz explains on CNN’s Reliable Sources, “there has always been kind of a latent racism.”
Always!
So, what is the evidence for this? Lenz dredges up this confession from Carlson’s past: “The idea that I’d be responsible for the sins (or, for that matter, share in the glory of the accomplishments) of dead people who happened to share my skin tone has always confused me.”
His confusion does not confuse Lenz, apparently. Not at all! Being resistant to racial identitarianism, which is all that Carlson fessed up to, amounts to racism, dontcha know.
The peculiarities of Lenz’s gumshoe work on the Carlson Mystery are not limited to uncovering the depths of his racism, though. She begins her piece focusing on “shouting.”
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Tucker’s a shouter. She says. “‘You were definitely shouting before. That’s why this is funny,’ I say laughing nervously. ‘Because you are like, “I AM NOT SHOUTING!”’”
I guess those all-caps help. Case closed!
But there is a problem with writing this analysis out, orthographics aside. A strong, confrontational argumentation style is not understood in the exact same manner by everyone. What’s shouting to one person isn’t shouting to another. This is an area where people can honestly differ.
It’s all very subjective.
So could that be the excuse for Lyz Lenz’s odd forays into old-fashioned “New Journalism”?
In the course of regaling us with the factoid that Carlson is “worth over $8 million” and stands to inherit even more because his step mom is “Patricia Swanson of the Swanson frozen dinner fortune,” Lenz contrasts that with her own struggle as “a single mom, a freelance writer with two kids, swiftly facing a future with no health care.”
Uh, OK. Thanks for sharing? Lenz acknowledges that journalists are “not supposed to make it about ourselves,” but does anyway. CNN Money describes this as “daring,”
We learn more, alas. Lenz is divorcing her husband of 12 years, who is . . . [gut-punch] . . . a Republican. Their split “didn’t come because of the election,” she says, though “the election certainly revealed a lot of huge problems that we couldn’t overcome.”
Just as Tucker Carlson cannot fathom his responsibility for all Caucasoid sins, he probably won’t grok how her divorce could be in any way relevant to his peculiar essence, either.
Racist! Sexist! Meany!
Or just a Man of Mystery.
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