House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News star Tucker Carlson and his team access to more than 40,000 hours of security footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol, and the result Carlson produced this week was precisely as we expected: a hodgepodge of glaring factual inaccuracies, distortions, misrepresentations, glaring omissions and sloppy logic, bound together in service of Carlson’s incendiary conspiracy theory that Democrats and journalists deliberately exaggerated the attack as a pretext to hurt people like his viewers.
The programs also reveal that if you ask Carlson whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, the answer will depend on who is listening.
In private, Carlson apparently recognized that Trump and his closest allies were lying in the immediate aftermath of the election when they claimed that widespread fraud had rigged the result against the sitting president.
Messages revealed in February through Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox show that Carlson “agreed that ‘there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome’ of the election,” and that he complained to a colleague about needing to cover Trump’s election fraud claims. Texting with fellow prime-time host Laura Ingraham, he bemoaned the “unbelievably offensive” lies he argued Trump’s lawyers were telling about the election, but concluded, “Our viewers are good people, and they believe it.”
Yet on Carlson’s program, with an average of more than 3 million viewers tuning in, it’s a different story. With his ratings and paycheck on the line, Carlson tells the audience what it wants to hear — that Trump’s re-election was stolen from him. On the very night the filing was released, Carlson claimed that President Joe Biden’s vote total “would seem to defy the laws of known physics.” The following week, he claimed that Biden “took power in an election so sketchy that many Americans don’t believe…
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