NYT Obsessed With Tucker
Twitter censor-in-chief was paid $17 million last year
A lifestyle magazine and political tabloid for neurotic progressives called the New York Times has a new obsession. The outlet is apparently infatuated with Tucker Carlson, the top-rated cable news personality who punctuates the evening lineup at Fox News.
NYT/Pravda ran a three-part series intended as a takedown of Carlson, whose popularity it finds ever so baffling and troubling. The first two installments of the story totaled a whopping 17,600 words. The third was a long multimedia somethingerather that was formatted too annoyingly to examine.
I’ll save you the time of reading the the pieces and cut to the heart of NYT’s gripe:
At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black [sic] and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas.
What a surprise! A leftwing media outlet is not making reasoned arguments for its point of view or offering facts, but instead calling its opponents racist. It also claims its opponents are upset with demographic change in America, which will lead inevitably to Democrat victories, notwithstanding all recent evidence to the contrary. That’s never been done before!
As someone who has dealt with crisis communications in government and business, I find the evolution of this slur to be interesting. In the old days, an accusation like that from NYT or another major outlet would be taken very seriously and require a concerted, energetic response. That would include a careful refutation of any arguments made and the deployment of supporters of the accused to get a countervailing argument into the public. Now, no one need bother. This type of rubber-stamp accusation is used so often, so flippantly, and so misleadingly that no one who matters cares. It’s just noise from a media outlet that saved itself from decline and bankruptcy by telling lifestyle liberals what they want to hear.
Speaking of wildly successful media business models, as good corporate salesmen, NYT reporters should have also guessed at why a 2020 attempt by them and a Twitter mob to get Tucker canceled failed, even after some corporate advertisers dropped support for the show. The reason is that Tucker is the biggest thing on the most important, most watched network. It would be ridiculous for cable providers not to offer Fox News in any package for consumers. This reality allows Fox to charge impressive carriage fees of the providers. Last year, Fox News earned about $2.9 billion in revenue. Two-thirds came in the form of carriage fees; about $1 billion from ad sales. The ads are nice, but changing the ad mix on a program or even going ad free in the short term is not critical for the network. If anything, the failed boycott just gave Tucker and his guests more time on air.
Also of note in the NYT series is despite its length and the scrutiny of Tucker’s past going back to high school—basically the treatment the Left gives any Republican-nominated Supreme Court nominee—the liberal outlet fails to land a single memorable punch. No financial impropriety. No charlatanism. No misbehavior. No colleagues even asserting offline racism or “white nationalism.” I remember when hit pieces weren’t so boring.
A similar attempt in the series to smear The Daily Caller (to which I have contributed dozens of opinion articles) comes up completely empty. The worst assertion is that its young reporters weren’t paid lavishly (i.e., the business model of virtually every political media outfit), were aggressive, and some reported on the immigration issues that have loomed large since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator.
Of course, the NYT never confesses its real beef. Trump was odd in that the man and the victory came before a clearly identified set of principles and policies. Yes, there was America First and Make America Great Again, but those rubrics lacked anything like the detail of the New Deal, Reaganism, or even Bubba Clinton and the New Democrats. Margaret Thatcher liked to say, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” It wasn’t the complete reverse with Trump, but close: Trump and the New Right came on the scene in 2016 without a clearly communicated doctrine beyond a few key issues. After taking office, the policy process in Trump’s administration was a mess, so that didn’t help. There are many voices defining the New Right today in the wake of Trump. But Tucker is the foremost among them, and he defines it a little more each weeknight, and in a manner that is more appealing than anyone else in media. And for that, he must be destroyed, or so reason the keyboard warriors at the NYT.
Twitter’s Censor in Chief
In our latest edition of the Simon & Whiton video podcast, Mark Simon and I take a look at the business part of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, as well as looming crises in China and Japan. Mark points out just how badly run Twitter has been, including paying $17 million a year to a woman in charge of censoring conservatives who probably would have done the job for free.
Please watch or listen and subscribe to the podcast on YouTube or your favorite podcast catalog. If you don’t, al Qaeda wins.
Doom Forecast
Warren Buffet said over the weekend that you should buy stocks, making the assumption that April’s steep decline in risker equities has reset prices. He is wrong and you should do the opposite of what he suggests.
Factors driving the market and economy lower have only begun to take effect. On the air, I have heard a surprising number of stock pickers say that the Federal Reserve will get ahead of inflation. Is this the same Federal Reserve that has been wrong from beginning to end on inflation? The same Fed that should have tightened monetary policy in the fall of 2020 when it was obvious WuFlu was manageable and economic activity roared back after the worst of the shutdowns?
Actually, that Fed kept the foot on the monetary gas pedal for another 18 months and a good 12 months after it was clear that inflation was a problem. Even today, it is not serious about arresting inflation. After this week’s expected half-point interest rate hike, rates will still be below one percent. With inflation around seven percent, that means real rates are below zero. They should be at least as high as inflation.
The other side of the monetary policy coin is the money supply. The Fed has created more dollars out of thin air since 2018 than it did cumulatively in the preceding history of the United States. The first chart below illustrates the magnitude of this dilution of the dollar: it displays the Fed’s balance sheet, which exploded when the Fed bought government debt and mortgages with dollars it created. That is what has driven equity and housing prices so high. The last two years makes the intense money creation (“quantitative easing”) after the 2008 financial crisis look like a mere blip.
Next, check out the second graph. It is the same data, but focused on the beginning of the Biden administration to today. It shows how little the Fed has done so far to slow and reverse the increase of its balance sheet.
If the market is freaking out before any real hike in interest rates and reduction in the Fed’s balance sheet (and national money supply), what will happen when this process gets going in earnest? Ordinarily, one would expect the Fed to wimp out at the prospect of deflating assets and recession, but inflation has it in a corner. This foretells much more pain.
Parting Shot
Neoliberals and globalists like the Wall Street Journal editorial page were very boo hoo when Victor Orban was reelected prime minister of Hungary last month. He won despite opposition from the Biden administration, the EU elite, George Soros, and the democracy-industrial complex of think tanks and NGOs. Apparently Hungarians appreciate his variety of the New Right, which includes securing borders, declining to pursue government-orchestrated cultural revolution, and regulating foreign-influenced media.
Orban might have company: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been closing a gap in polls for his reelection. The Trump-like New Right figure is still behind in polls but has cut his opponent’s lead to single digits, and the election is not until October. His opponent, Lula, is a socialist former president who previously ran the economy and government into the ground. Watch for heads to explode if Bolsonaro pulls off a come-from-behind victory.
Just three weeks from now, a conservative-ish figure who is definitely not of the New Right faces a loss in Australia. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his party trail the left-leaning opposition coalition in all polls. Morrison has been tough on China and is a friend of the USA. However, like too many Republicans here, he did little to stop the Left from aggressive shutdown and control measures supposedly justified by WuFlu. At least in America we had Republican governors like Ron DeSantis (Florida) and Greg Abbott (Texas), and even the rare Democrat like Jared Polis (Colorado) who pushed back against the shutdownistas. No such luck in Australia, which was turned back into a prison colony for the better part of two years.