Tucker Carlson Fawns Over Harvard Study Two Weeks After Calling Its Authors ‘Political Hacks’

Proud anti-anti-Trumper Tucker Carlson has a complicated relationship with Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which has been studying news coverage of the 2016 election.

First, on May 5, Carlson had former Hillary Clinton adviser Peter Daou on his Fox News broadcast to discuss coverage of Clinton and Donald Trump during the presidential campaign. In response to Daou’s citing of a Shorenstein report that both candidates received overwhelmingly negative coverage, Carlson was incredulous, and slammed the Harvard study:

“These independent studies are done by political hacks posing as journalists,” Carlson said. “The Shorenstein Center? I mean, let’s be, I am a journalist, I sort of know the people who work there. And you’re not going to tell me — because again, I know them — that they’re politically independent? Because they’re not.”

“These people don’t like Trump,” he added.

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

Of course, Carlson’s vehement rejection of the Shorenstein study came before the center issued a further report detailing negative coverage of now-President Trump’s first 100 days.

Carlson opened his May 19 show reveling in the new report, first asking “exactly how liberal and how biased is the press?”

Watch here:

“For the answer to that, we’d have to go to social science,” Carlson continued. And now for the first time in a while, we actually have some, some real data.”

Carlson went on to tout the findings of the study: “A new study from researchers at Harvard University looked at 10 major news outlets and found the overwhelming majority of their coverage of the new administration’s first 100 days was hostile.”

Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple referred to the segment as “The Shorenstein celebration,” and pointed out that the studies — both the one derided by Carlson and the one celebrated by the host — are “almost identical,” according to the center.

In response to Carlson, Nicco Mele, the director of the Shorenstein Center, told CNN’s Dylan Beyers that both studies were written by the same staff:

“Curiously two weeks ago Tucker Carlson trashed our early study of general election coverage as liberal bias political hackery, but this study – with the same professor, same staff, same methodology – he praised effusively.”

The hypocrisy on display was stark, but not unusual for Carlson, an anchor fiercely dedicated to mocking Trump’s critics instead of reckoning with the president himself.

[image via screengrab]

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