Full stream: Tucker Carlson in 2019 Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
For decades now, Americans have preferred to learn about the news when someone angry and red-faced yells at them. Our cable newsrooms, even mainstream channels like CNN, were staffed with people with dyspepsia and choleric. They microdosed us with information, watered down with commentary, debate and heated conclusions offered by men who look like they should be selling you a car and women who look like they just stepped off the shelf in a Bond girl factory.
These announcers have replaced old-fashioned seriousness with at least five warning signs of an impending coronal event—or, in the case of Tucker Carlson, the same puppy-dog confused look my dog gives me when popcorn goes into my mouth instead of hers. Carlson, who left Fox News yesterday, has always been the more suave of the group: a man who didn't raise his voice but simply asked, cautiously and with feigned seriousness, if America was sliding into civil war.
With dwindling ratings and an audience whose attention is scattered between an endless number of channels and devices, one wonders if we have reached the end of news delivered by a screaming head. The ratings of Carlson and his colleagues have steadily fallen over the years; figures like Fox's Bill O'Reilly and CNN's Don Lemon disappeared from television amid allegations of harassment and misogynistic behavior.
It was a fairly recent invention, this news feed system, at the same time telling you how you should feel about it. Whether filtered through the seriousness of Rachel Maddow or the smirk of aging fraternity boy Sean Hannity, or through the ever-expanding opinion sections of newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times, the news has become less informative and more persuasive.
I have seen this slow transformation from the beginning, during the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some believed that the social changes of the era had a hidden meaning. It was no longer enough to communicate what was happening: it had to be contextualized and decoded.
However, these changes did not start on cable television, but on radio, where broadcasts on AM channels and at lower frequencies were cheap and one could find a captured audience of housewives, truckers and laborers who listened to hours of telephone conversations. in the show. It was here that religious, political, and newsworthy merged into a 24-hour stream of content, and where conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, later joined by figures like Glenn Beck and Hannity, built their empires. These radio stations thrived in places underserved by mainstream journalism: entire counties without bookstores, entire regions without dailies.
Limbaugh's voice was a constant presence in my rural Kansas childhood. My father acted out his performance in his little town shop, and my aunt put it on in her kitchen. For hours a day he ranted and maddened and chatted and we all heard it. He and other eccentrics imagined a world outside the isolated, homogenous enclave of my family—and that was the disintegration of a nation. There was AIDS, there were feminists, there were abortions, there was urban crime, there was a drug epidemic, and there was a godless, sinister political cabal (the Clintons) in power.
And the people telling my family about the precarious situation of the rest of the country also told them what to do about it. Republican politicians, as soon as they realized that they would not be punished for their association with extremists, rushed to these programs, where they could talk for a long time and not answer pressing questions.
Former Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly. Photo: AP
When Pat Robertson said on TV that HIV-positive people should be sent to the island for perpetual quarantine to protect the young and innocent from infection, it became a topic of family conversation. “Well, you know what to do with all these…” — one can imagine the choice of word. After one of them overheard someone say that people with AIDS should get their tattoos visible so everyone knows who's infected, the idea spread all over the dinner table like a terrible green bean casserole.
It was not an addition to their news consumption: it was their only source. They insisted that mainstream news had a liberal slant, so why shouldn't they prioritize their own sources that were in line with their conservative views? They did not see how their way of life, rural, religious-family, portrayed in the media, rejected his authority. They felt increasingly separated from the rest of the country, and talk radio soothed their sense of rejection by reassuring them that they were righteous and everyone else was perverted.
It wasn't that the radio had radicalized my family members—they were already on the fringes of political and religious beliefs. But it gave them jargon and talking points to articulate their ambiguous feelings of fear and insecurity, and it gave them concrete targets to fight. It made them feel useful, informed, and confident in what needed to be done.
Voice of America: Carlson was once America's highest paid television personality. Photo: AP Photo/Richard Drew, File
The overwhelming popularity of these figures, once marginalized on radio and television, soon became inspiring figures for the media. Fox News took Rush Limbaugh's script and used it to fill their daily programs with lengthy, talk radio-style, authored programs. It was the winning formula. CNN soon responded and received higher ratings for the comments than the original reports; MSNBC has had moderate success with its centrist versions of the Fox show. These programs were almost completely empty of content: each piece of news dragged on for many hours of talk, debate, and shouting.
But these shows, once popular and influential, have been losing viewers since Donald Trump left office. And while it would be easy and reassuring to think that this says something about how we Americans are turning the corner in our political culture, from polarization to bridging, the reality is probably grimmer. Perhaps there are just too many screaming heads for any of them to have a dominant market share.
Everything, as you can see, is now Tucker Carlson. The woman screaming on her YouTube channel about male violence infiltrating women's space through the transgender Trojan horse is Tucker Carlson. The woman seriously telling her TikTok audience about some horrific real-life crime case while she puts on makeup is Tucker Carlson. The man who explains the need for a socialist revolution to his followers through the headlines while playing a video game is Tucker Carlson. Even off the air, Tucker Carlson will always be with us, because today Tucker Carlson is all of us.
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