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Carlson Paid Price for Being Powerful, Likeable Truth-Teller

Originally published at Newsmax

Most discussion about Tucker Carlson leaving Fox News has focused on drama and speculation of his celebrity status, and his next career move.

But there are profound lessons that have come to the fore via his departure from Fox, which reveal more nuance and depth about what’s wrong with America’s mainstream media; that is, how it’s influenced by America haters who manipulate advertisers to defund truth tellers, and how weak leadership of our media utterly fails our country and helps our enemies.

Recent polling conducted within days of the separation shows that Tucker’s popularity has gone up, while that of Fox News has gone down sharply. Tucker, as a one-man act appears to be more popular than the entire on-air chorus of Fox News.

What is also noteworthy is that Tucker is emerging as a considerably bigger and better man than any of his critics, including those in the Murdoch family who are the primary owner/managers of Fox News.

Tucker is admired for being a courageous pursuer and teller of truth, while the Murdochs now preside over a declining Fox News empire of their own obsequious making.

Increasingly the viewers get this — that Fox is following the ways of its other mainstream media competitors. Those competitors have ceased real news reporting, becoming purveyors of narratives sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere, preventing viewers from getting informed and thinking about the most critical issues which affect their overall well-being.

It turns out that most if not all the narratives promoted by the media and peddled to the masses are largely created by the wealthy elite.

And they often succeed at this by censorship and cancellation.

Something is indeed very wrong with this picture.

Tucker had the largest viewership of any talk show in the genre, and he was waking people up more effectively than any other “talking head.”

But he was relentlessly attacked by left-wing critics who succeeded in intimidating advertisers from continuing their support of his show.

This may have been a factor in Fox management’s decision to cancel him.

Many have noted that Fox received advertising revenue from Pfizer.

Did that affect the network’s coverage of an important and lasting story of our time: COVID-19 vaccines? 

This is particularly troubling for our national defense, where all serving in the military were mandated to take “the jab.”

Five days before he was let go by Fox, Tucker Carlson broke ranks in his “Tonight” monologue pointing out that some TV networks networks pushed the vaccine.

Did the they do so to please their Big Pharma advertisers?

Tucker told the truth about how Pharma advertisers (arguably) dominated TV.

We’ve arrived at the point, where we are witness to TV news networks no longer acting as  purveyors of news, and more ominously, no longer serving in the role of being watchdogs

An appreciable number have been reduced to being conduits and facilitators of special interest elitist narratives.

Two days after Fox announced the reorganization of their evening lineup, Tucker took to Twitter to broadcast a monologue at his same usual time slot of his now former 8 p.m. “Tonight” show.

He praised the large number of kind and decent American people who “really care about what’s true,” adding, that “most of the debates you see on television are … completely irrelevant.”

He then went on to say that big topics that will define our future get “virtually no discussion at all — topics like war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, and natural resources.”

What Tucker was saying was the news media is utterly failing the American people.

Wow.

That implies that because Americans are ill-informed, the nation must now be in peril.

Wise man that he is, Tucker Carlson framed many of the most vexing problems that he covered in nonpolitical terms as he did before a large group in Washington, D.C. after his last Fox show was recorded.

There, he simply said that if we want to know what’s evil and what’s good, we only must look at what these two conditions produce: “[G]ood is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness. It’s true. It is.”

And evil is characterized by their opposites.

Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth.

So, if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you are really advocating for is evil.

That’s just true. Bam!

In one simple two-part fell swoop Tucker describes without political reference what the Democratic Party has become, as can be seen in every Democratically-controlled city across America.

The good news is that, ever-the-optimist Tucker Carlson believes this depressing condition can’t last because it simply won’t work: “When honest people say what’s true — calmly and without embarrassment — they become powerful.

At the same time, the liars who have been trying to silence them shrink, and they become weaker. That’s the iron law of the universe — true things prevail.”

One can’t help but recognize that what makes Tucker Carlson so powerful is his God-given combination of compelling and disarming qualities of being an extraordinarily likeable truth teller. So, if that iron law is true, the best for Tucker Carlson must be yet to come.

And like an exceptional performance’s encore, let’s bring him back, unleashed — now.  

Scott S. Powell

Senior Fellow, Center on Wealth and Poverty
Scott Powell has enjoyed a career split between theory and practice with over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur and rainmaker in several industries. He joins the Discovery Institute after having been a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution for six years and serving as a managing partner at a consulting firm, RemingtonRand. His research and writing has resulted in over 250 published articles on economics, business and regulation. Scott Powell graduated from the University of Chicago with honors (B.A. and M.A.) and received his Ph.D. in political and economic theory from Boston University in 1987, writing his dissertation on the determinants of entrepreneurial activity and economic growth.