Tucker Carlson, school board candidates and the problem of ‘making everything political’ | Opinion
In what may forever be known as the great Monday Media Purge of 2023, Don Lemon has been ousted from CNN And Tucker Carlson and Fox News have agreed to part ways. It’s not clear yet exactly why either is moving on, but for now, let’s consider what these two men did for politics, cable news, and hungry audiences.
In many ways, they contributed to making everything political for audiences hungry for a 24/7 cycle of controversy.
Whether you watched or liked them, the two were media giants at their respective outlets. Carlson had an average prime-time audience of 2.5 million viewers, and his show helped keep Fox News viewership consistently higher than CNN and MSNBC. Carlson could make a small-time conservative journalist’s media career in a five-minute slot. Lemon struggled more to find viewers, but it was easy to see that Lemon was as far to the left as Carlson was to the right.
Over the years, Carlson became increasingly far-right, most notably legitimizing the riots January 6, 2021. Even recently, Carlson’s staff was given thousands of hours of Capitol footage from that day, including some that showed the “QAnon shaman” leisurely walking about with a half-dozen Capitol officers by his side, occasionally chatting. Carlson suggested that because there had been some peaceful moments that day, amid the rioting, coverage from other outlets — CNN, for example — had been one-sided and Jan. 6 wasn’t that bad. Even for Carlson, an intelligent political observer, this was too biased. He’d gone too far.
Before a lawsuit was settled between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox was settled, messages were released that showed that Carlson and many others at Fox News knew that Trump’s claims of a rigged election were wrong. Carlson himself wrote that he loathed Donald Trump, surprising, since he seemed to be shilling for him on Fox News like it was his job.
That was part of the problem: Carlson became overtly political probably because he felt he was a voice for an idea that seemed to be pushed out of mainstream media. For a period of time, when Fox News first became a popular outlet, Carlson’s show — an iteration of Bill O’ Reilly before him — was refreshing. National news media have largely carried liberal ideas.
Conservatives like my dad, a small business owner who spent most of his life in Minnesota, were drawn to Fox News because they finally talked about the principles he lived his life by: lower taxes, individual responsibility, and love of liberty/ These weren’t political points hurled at an opponent; they were ideas that he and so many other conservatives believe central to the country they love.
Somewhere along the way though, real life for a lot of people has become a lot like watching CNN or Fox News full time. Maybe they were mirroring Lemon and Carlson. But the reverse could be true.
Part of my job is to interview candidates for office in the Fort Worth area and the state, from Gov. Greg Abbott to school board hopefuls. Recently, my colleagues and I completed more than a dozen sit downs with local candidates. Many demonstrated the precise problem: We want politics in fewer parts of life, but we want to fight over just about everything.
“I just want to get politics out of school,” many of them said to us. “Everything has gotten so political,” was a common refrain from average folks running for school board.
Usually when someone says that, they mean that someone else’s politics they don’t agree with — left or right — are seeping into library books or history class, and they don’t like it.
It’s hard to know which came first, our focus on politics or the media echo chamber around it. A University of Texas at Austin poll found that the same share of Democrats and Republicans, about 40%, watch cable news. It’s not a huge number of people overall, but those who watch are steeped in politics.
For people like my dad — and there are plenty of liberals like this, too — the fact that everything is political isn’t a problem. There’s a massive divide between left and right, and cable news has helped push many people towards extreme ends. Social media algorithms play a major role as well. It causes everything, even school board meetings, to be divisive.
By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, one uncle has been watching just Don Lemon and another just Tucker Carlson, and now they’re sitting next to each other looking at the turkey seething over abortion policy and taxes.
There’s politics in a lot of life, and as John Adams once said, it’s a privilege to be able to take part. The problem is that some have made it so much of our identities. We push that into every arena of our lives and we don’t know how to temper it, to listen to others, or hear another viewpoint.
I’ve been in the small room in Alexandria, Virginia, where Adams and Thomas Jefferson supposedly quarreled over how to run the country. They even suspended their friendship briefly over their ideological differences. But, like grown ups, they apologized, reconciled and wrote letters for 15 more years.
Politics isn’t the problem, but if you’re just watching cable news and then celebrating July 4 as if your views are the only ones worth considering, then you’re doing freedom wrong. Your life and your holidays don’t have to exude politics like a 24/7 cable news show — even if you like watching them.
