Ex-Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Weighs in on Tucker Carlson: ‘Partly Why I Ended up Getting Out of There’
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace discussed Tuesday the alleged role of Tucker Carlson in pushing the ideology that partly fueled the racially-motivated mass shooting in Buffalo over the weekend that killed ten Black Americans.
Wallace played a clip from President Biden’s speech denouncing white supremacy earlier in the day and clips of Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson arguing they and the Republican Party are being unfairly connected to the shooting.
“I mean, obviously a mass shooter is responsible for the violence and the heinous acts that the mass shooter committed. It is also true that the ideology left in the mass shooter’s screed mirrors the ideology championed by Tucker Carlson,” Wallace concluded.
“What happens at Fox News when something like this happens?” she then asked Carl Cameron, a former chief political correspondent at Fox News.
“I can’t even imagine. That’s partly why I ended up getting out of there,” Cameron responded, adding:
Yeah. It really is kind of horrible to think that journalists with national and international capacity are putting together this type of nonsense. I think the president did a great job. I wish he had done a lot of this a lot sooner, and we need a lot more from the left and the middle, and we got to watch out because the Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation, and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble.
The president acknowledged that it’s time to actually start doing things and maybe taking some names and putting people in jail.
Carlson did denounce the Buffalo shooter as “racist, bitterly so” adding he “reduces people to their skin color. That’s the essence of racism and it is immoral.” The top-rated Fox News host has also denounced political violence on his show.
“I mean, wow, Carl. Let me follow up with you,” Wallace responded. “What you, I think just touched on, maybe inadvertently is that where the mainstream of America is is frankly where President Biden was today, saying the white supremacy is poison on our body politic. Explain then how Tucker Carlson has so many viewers because he’s not in the mainstream of the body politic. What he espouses is the fringe of the fringe,” she asked.
“I really can’t channel how Tucker believes in any of this stuff and how the network can go through with it. I will say this, however, it is very clear that this type of lying and deception is catching on,” Cameron responded.
“There’s racism across the borders, immigrants are being beaten up and being harassed more than ever. Judaism is constantly under fire, and all of this is essentially being accepted by a left — excuse me, a far, far-right community of people who have nothing but grievance based on lies,” he continued, adding:
How a network — and it’s not just Fox. Social media in general is the biggest purveyor of all of this, and there’s a couple of things about this that are really important. A lot of the immigrants who are coming over here use Whatsapp instead of watching television or using other platforms, and if their aunt gets a piece of garbage and passes it on to the nephew, a lot of those immigrants are coming to the United States thinking that Trumpism and the kind of nonsense that comes from Fox News is an actual reality here.
And again, it goes to all types of racism and hate, not just Democrat versus Republican or Black versus White, Asians, Latinos, all of them are being bombarded with this type of disinformation.
Watch the full clip above via MSNBC
