Rick Luthmann and I were back for another edition of The Unknown. We talked about the election, an update on Paul Boyne, and a new lawsuit on the Girard case.
Approximately twelve minutes in, I gave my analysis of the state of the media today.
The problem I see is that it’s an engagement marketplace. This means the key is to get everyone talking about you.
As the old adage goes, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
The result is that the winners are those with the most provocative statements, regardless of accuracy.
Let’s take Tucker Carlson. Last week, he was on with Steven Bannon, when he claimed that nuclear weapons were made by demons. He further pronounced that we lost touch with spirituality after dropping an atom bomb in World War II.
Carlson has been on a crusade to turn perception of Truman’s use of the atom bomb into a negative. What he said to Bannon, was gibberish, in my opinion.
“Not since we dropped the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and decided we were gods, and gods didn’t exist, we have been a secular society,” Carlson said.
He went on to claim that “demons” created the nuclear bomb in the same interview.
“I’ve never met a person who can isolate the moment where nuclear technology became known to man. And so where did it come from, exactly? Oh, German scientists in the ’30s. Really? When, name the date. And I’ve never heard anybody do that,” Carlson said.
Carlson’s claims are absurd, but they had their desired effect. One YouTube video said his statements went “viral.”
That’s the point. In the current day, the goal is to go viral. Carlson achieved that goal weeks ago when he invited a Hitler apologist on his show.
Darryl Cooper, his guest, said that the real villain of WWII was Winston Churchill, not Adolph Hitler.
That’s because Hitler offered Britain, supposedly, a deal which would have avoided WWII.
Carlson called Cooper a “respected historian.”
Elon Musk called the interview “interesting” before erasing the tweet, likely because he didn’t watch it before commenting.
Conservatives and liberals both spent a week or so poking numerous holes in the theories pontificated on Tucker’s show.
Guess what, everyone was talking about Tucker, again. That’s all that matters. In a different time, treating a Hitler apologist with respect would end your career. Today, it gets you invited to speak at the Republican Convention.
Before all that, Tucker interviewed Vladimir Putin, who spun him on hundreds of years of history, while Tucker sat back and allowed a vicious dictator to justify his naked aggression in invading a smaller country, Ukraine.
Though the interview has been viewed by millions, it’s extremely forgettable, except possibly the moment when Putin informed Carlson that Carlson’s father wanted to be CIA.
What it did was get Carlson attention at the time.
Carlson knows very little about history, but that doesn’t matter. That’s because he knows how to be provocative. That makes him successful.
He’s not the only one to master this trait. Last spring, Candace Owens began a crusade to expose Brigitte Macron as a transvestite.
One article describing her quest was titled: Candace Owens Bets Career on Politician's Wife Being a Man: 'Terrifying'
Conservative commentator Candace Owens said she would bet her career that French President Emmanuel Macron's wife Brigitte is a man.
"After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man," Owens wrote in a Tuesday post on X, formerly Twitter. "Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as establishment. I have never seen anything like this in my life. The implications here are terrifying."
Owens spoke in depth about the longstanding conspiracy theory during Monday's episode of her podcast, arguing that if Brigitte really wanted to debunk those claims, she could simply release photos from the first 30 years of her life. Analyzing a rare family photo of Brigitte as a baby, Owens said Brigitte was a "dead ringer" for her brother, and thus, they were really the same person.
Birgitte Macron, who has three children from a prior relationship, is a woman. These allegations are absurd; however, Owens never risked her career making them.
She got what she needed: attention.
Liberals do the same thing. Shortly before the election, Rachel Maddow went viral with a rant claiming that a {non existent} President Harris would cancel all Elon Musk government contracts.
It was liberal porn which had the desired effect: it went viral.
Joy Reid and Joe Scarborough are both masters at making outlandish statements which are then shared on social media to both mockery and excitement, depending on one’s political perspective.
Shortly before President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Scarborough pronounced, “No, I just always told people that he's — the president is very sharp. If you say something or write something, there have been times he’s called and he’s refuted it very sharply.”
This statement looks asinine in retrospect, but it hasn’t hurt his career. It got him what was necessary at the time: attention.
More recently, Paul Sperry put this on X.
It was featured on Bad Legal Takes because cable news doesn’t have a license and isn’t regulated by the FCC in the way he suggests. He was wrong, not to mention his contempt for the first amendment, but he got lots of attention.
That’s all that matters. In today’s media environment, all that matters is going viral; being right takes a back seat to getting attention.
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