I'll admit I'm a snob.
I don't watch television newscasts. It's been a couple of decades since I last watched CNN. I see Fox News sometimes at the gym, but I've always got my headphones in. I've spent more time on MSNBC in my life than I have watching it.
There's nothing particularly virtuous in this; it's just that nobody should feel compelled to use products and services they don't like. And I don't like TV newscast programming; it seems like a bunch of deeply unserious people cos-playing like they know stuff. The world doesn't devolve to Canali suits and bluster, to high blondes and scorn, and your congressperson isn't as big a deal as they pretend.
This shocks some people, and there's always some troll in the comments section ready to call you a liar. (Last week one of them said I wasn't old enough to remember something that happened when I was 9 years old.) Surely, my liberal friends tell me, I carve out an exception for must-watch Rachel Maddow? Sorry, never done it. I do watch HBO's "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver," and admire the show's research staff, but I don't take that as news.
I see clips here and there and read the industry gossip. I know who Don Lemon is, though I've never watched what used to be his show. I think Tucker Carlson still owes me lunch from the brief time he worked here. I followed his career until he stopped working for the Weekly Standard; I saw that clip of Jon Stewart dragging him on "Crossfire" and know a lot about his rise and apparent (maybe temporary) fall, but I never watched one minute of his program.
If I ran into him tomorrow, I wouldn't spit on Tucker. I'd probably offer my condolences, not that he needs them. It stings to lose a job. Just because you're financially invulnerable and probably a quarter of the country's dream 2024 presidential candidate doesn't mean you don't get your feelings hurt now and then. He's a human being, he has a wife and kids. He once had a close friendship with Hunter Biden. He's not a cyborg.
And Tucker knows better than anybody what half the country is thinking and saying about him. Even for an Übermensch, it's got to be hard to be that disliked. I'm not sure he's completely OK with Olga Skabeeva, co-host of the the Kremlin-controlled political talk show "Rossiya1," calling him "our pet" either. ("Rossiya1" is another show I don't watch.)
But the guy will be OK. He had enough money before he wandered off into the journalism-adjacent business of outrage stoking and political kafaybe, and made a lot of money in that circus. And for a lot of people, that's what's really important.
While I don't imagine anyone who would read this deep into a newspaper column needs to hear this, Carlson is an entertainer, not a journalist. He might disagree with this--he might try, as Dave "Dr. D." Schultz did to John Stossel, to slap me around for saying it--but we should all understand the inherent phoniness of the cable outrage industry.
What he produced was an entertainment product. There are plenty of smart people who like it, just as there are plenty of people who enjoy the WWE smackdown. They understand that it really is on some level fake, but that doesn't mean it can't be artful or even edifying.
For instance, it was perfectly possible to admire Rush Limbaugh as a broadcaster while abhorring the odious racism and sexism embedded in the over-the-top opinions he performatively expressed. Limbaugh didn't, by many accounts, take his own shtick--which he admitted was shtick--seriously.
"Anytime you express an opinion, half the people are going to disagree with it," Limbaugh once explained. "If you embellish the opinion with confidence and cockiness, then you're getting into generating hatred and so forth. Because a lot of people would love to be confident about what they think, but most people aren't. Most people are tepid about their opinions. And if they are subjected to someone, such as myself, who's not, then it tends to offend them.
"The key is knowing that nobody can get everybody to like them. And keeping in mind that the law of averages indicates that half of the people who listen to you aren't going to like you, you've still got to find a way to make those who aren't going to like you enjoy listening to your program. I believe people turn on radio to be entertained, to be entertained, to be entertained."
Did Limbaugh even believe the things he said on the air?
"That's for me to know and you to find out," he smirked.
Fair enough, I guess. Limbaugh was an entertainer, more like a comedian. He wasn't a journalist and didn't pretend to be. And he would only make those sort of remarks in front of an industry crowd in front of broadcast professionals more concerned with tradecraft than content. Limbaugh's advice was non-partisan; it wasn't about winning hearts and minds, it was about winning attention.
Because it's television. As an MSNBC producer once said into my earpiece during a commercial break on TV talk show "Hardball," "it doesn't matter what you say, or if you believe what you say, so long as you say it like you believe it." The camera doesn't like--and the audience doesn't tolerate--nuance.
Carlson at some point stopped becoming an interesting young conservative writer and became a performance artist. Being a clown on TV pays a lot better than being what Carlson's putative mentor Paul Greenberg would call an inky wretch. (Just ask Stephen A. Smith, who was a pretty good sports writer before deciding to do a Jackie Chiles act on ESPN.)
And while I won't argue with anyone who observes that the proliferation of divisive, dumbed- down political talk programs (which thrive in part because they are so cheaply produced) is bad for the republic, I can think of a lot of things that are bad for the republic, including voter suppression, ready-to-drink cocktails, Instagram filters and "smart" homes.
But no one makes you pay attention to or invest trust in these entertainment products. You don't have to watch. I'm proof of the concept.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.