Kill The Witch: Canadian Media Beclowns Itself Again

They don’t get it. They never do. One of the knee slappers in the Tucker Carlson saga is that Canadian media may be the ones most genuinely outraged by his behaviour (“Father Coughlin red-meat racist”, they clucked). Monday’s news of his dismissal brought the righteous grandees of Canadian media out to wag their fingers and say “We told you so” after his “threat” to invade Canada to restore democracy.

By contrast, the aggrieved in the U.S. were almost all the predictable political fainting goats. His was a crime without victims. It was part oi the game. But CDN media bought it all, predictably calling him racist, sexist, homophobic and, yes, a Nazi. (BTW his executive producer is gay.) What has been described as “doing it to himself” is actually the mandate of journalism. Get it right, and get it first.

As opposed to CNN, MSNBC and the DC print media doing FBI/ CIA spin, Carlson was correct on the major hoaxes of the past seven years from Russiagate to Hunter Biden laptop to Ukraine impeachment to FBI’s targeting of parents school groups. As an example, he asked, how did the Muller Investigation spend two years with a team of 19 lawyers, $40 million in resources, 40 FBI agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants & 500 witnesses— and not find out that Hillary Clinton created the hoax they were investigating?” (Answer: They never interviewed Clinton’s campaign manger.)

But the broader audience was largely unprepared for these truths until much later in the news cycle. See: On the eve of his re-election bid announcement, CNN was running against Biden’s re-election by pointing out his laughable approval numbers. 

While some blame FOX’s settlement of the $685M Dominion Voting case, Carlson’s schism with the Murdoch clan likely dates to 2022 when FOX News polling experts assured him a major GOP win in Congress. He was personally embarrassed when the GOP flopped in effort to win the Senate and flip some governorships. And FOX News could not back up fraud charges emanting from several states. It showed. “Do the executives understand how much trust and credibility we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real,” Carlson texted after the 2022 debacle.

He cut away from the FOX brand to do documentaries and long-form interviews. He built a separate space which allowed a home for people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Alex Berenson, Jason Whitlock and Glenn Greenwald. Which was increasingly intolerable to the Murdochs. Hence, Monday's purge. (Which, hilariously, coincided with the firing of Carlson’s reliable punchline, Don Lemon, at CNN.) Or maybe not.

No doubt Wall Street and its Big Pharma friends were excited. (The Pentagon sure was: “We’re a better country without him bagging on our military every night in front of hundreds of thousands of people… good riddance.”) Despite Carlson being the No. 1 figure in cable news history Wall Street tried to starve Carlson’s show of advertising revenues, reducing his stable of support to Mr. Pillow, a vitamin company and Navage sinus machine. As in, who cares what the audience wants, here’s more prescription drugs to keep you sedated.

Kennedy summed up the pressure tactic. "@TuckerCarlson Carlson’s breathtakingly courageous April 19 monologue broke TV’s two biggest rules: Tucker told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content, and he lambasted obsequious newscasters for promoting jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless. For many years, Tucker has had the nation's biggest audience averaging 3.5 million — 10 times the size of CNN. Fox just demonstrated the terrifying power of Big Pharma.”

While his other targets congratulated themselves on being rid of Carlson and faith-tinged commentaries, some prominent liberal stars were making Carlson’s point about the corruption of media. Actor Tim Robbins, one of the few dedicated ACLU liberals left, blasted their failure to expose TwitterGate, “a massive censorship operation by the US government to control content on social media and eliminate any dissenting voices. Have you read their reporting? Or are you listening to the embarrassed, compromised hacks from the media that are covering their tracks?

“Could be the most important story related to our personal freedoms in the US and it’s being buried. Mainstream media have not only ignored the story but now attack the journalists, effectively serving as a thuggish censorship arm of the government. Meanwhile @StaceyPlaskett @RepJeffries @RepJerryNadler threaten journalist Matt Taibbi with jail time. What an embarrassing, shameful time for the Democrats and the ‘free’ press. You are losing any shred of credibility you had, you fucking fools. Oh, and by the way #FreeAssange

There are some making the same point about Canadian journalism, but they’re not Canadians. British historian and columnist Douglas K. Murray summed up the Media Party clique last December in his Munk Debates performance on the Trucker Convoy coverage. After reading a catalogue of CBC hacks (and others) demonizing the demonstrators at the expense of the facts— one called the truckers “a feral mob”, another suggested Putin was behind them— Murray unleashed.

“The Canadian mainstream media acted as an amen chorus of the Canadian government,” Murray argued. “Now why is this is rancid? So utterly, utterly, rancid and corrupt? Because in this country your media–your mainstream media–is funded by the government.”

So it should come as little surprise that Tucker Carlson is a bridge too far in the cozy world of Canadian journalism. While there are notable exceptions, most of  Canada's media bien pensants have no idea that touching the third rail, as Carlson did, was journalism. At best, what they do is fill space between the commercials.

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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx