On Fox News, Tucker Carlson Declares All Initial News Coverage ‘Always Wrong’ — Whether Intentional or Not

Fox News’s top-rated host Tucker Carlson, who has worked everywhere from CNN to MSNBC to PBS, began his show Wednesday night with a brutal indictment of the news media, arguing that all initial news coverage is “always wrong, not sometimes wrong, always wrong.”

Carlson, who like former President Donald Trump has long denounced the mainstream media as “fake news,” works on cable’s top-rated news channel, which prides itself on its breaking news coverage – as all major media outlets do.

“The frustrating thing about the news media, no matter how horrible they are, is that you need them. You can’t understand the world except through the news media,” began the cable news host.

“That’s where all of our information comes from. Can’t really change that at this point, but we can go into it with open eyes. And so you should know that the thing about reading the news is, even when it’s not intentionally dishonest and often it is. No matter what the intent of it, the first draft of the story that you read is always wrong,” continued Carlson, adding:

Not sometimes wrong. Always wrong. Occasionally in small ways. Sometimes in big and utterly distorting ways. “Dewey defeats Truman.” “Iraq has nukes.” “Russia bombed its own pipeline.” Stories like this are laughably untrue. They are an inversion of the truth, which inevitably emerges later. And at times it’s unintentional. They just made a mistake. They got it wrong.

But more often on the big stories, the ones that change policy, they are lying on purpose. So how do you know whether they’re lying on purpose or whether they just got it wrong by accident?

“Well, when the story trends on social media, you know, that means that somewhere there’s a tech executive who’s decided to crank up the propaganda dial in order to manipulate you,” Carlson continued, adding in an attack on “big tech.”

Notably, according to NewsWhip’s tracking of the top publishers on Facebook, FoxNews.com is the 6th most engaged publisher on the social media giant – behind publications like the DailyMail, the Mirror, and People.

“It’s really not so different from what the North Korean state news agency does. When there’s a famine, they start promoting stories about record rice harvests. So you wouldn’t notice,” Carlson added before adding getting to the real topic behind his opening: the war in Ukraine.

“So with that in mind, it would have been worth pausing for a moment in skepticism when you saw that phone, that story in your phone yesterday about how Russia had bombed Poland,” Carlson added.

“Poland is a member of NATO, the North American Treaty Organization. So are we. That means if Russia were to attack NATO, then we could very easily be obligated to attack Russia back. Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, so that would be inevitably, by definition, World War III. Hundreds of people might die. So this was not a small story. It was Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo stuff,” Carlson added.

“This story came as it so often does from the Associated Press, citing, again, as usual, a, quote, unnamed senior U.S. Intel official. So according to this unnamed Intel official, Russia had launched an entirely unprovoked first strike against Poland. The Russian military had lobbed missiles into Polish territory, thereby killing two Poles at a farm. So by definition, it was time for Europe and the U.S. to invoke Article five the collective defense principle and begin a total war on Vladimir Putin,” he added, which of course did not happen as NATO, President Biden, Ukraine and Poland all noted the missile that hit Poland was a stray Ukraine air defense missile – which was reported on in the AP as well as in the rest of the media.

Watch the full clip above via Fox News.

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