Alex Pareene's annual list of journalism's greatest hacks is out, and Tucker Carlson wins a prize for his willingness to do the breast-stroke through sewage (link is to a copy; Salon's site won't pull it up):
Some of Carlson's past hits include hyping the now forgotten "Journolist" fracas into a numbers-driver for The Daily Caller- after he was turned down for membership; getting nostalgic over some gay-bashing on MSNBC; calling for pro football player Michael Vick to get the chair for dogfighting; fretting that if Don't Ask Don't Tell was repealed, Muslim soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't take their American advisers seriously; sending videos of three interviews with quixotic 2010 SC Senate candidate Alvin Green to a "body language expert"; running articles on strippers and the "13 foxiest first ladies"; pretending MSNBC news host Rachel Maddow is a man; and thinking about running for president in '08 as a Libertarian. Oh, and hosting a bunch of cable news shows that failed.
In many ways Tucker Carlson’s a better symbol of the pathetic state of what passes for conservative journalism than even Glenn Beck or the late Andrew Breitbart, to name two of his contemporaries with a much larger following. Glenn Beck started as a no-account shock jock and is now a no-account Internet show host. Breitbart at least went from Drudge lackey to successful right-wing media mogul. Carlson, though, began his career in the most respectable fashion possible and has spent the ensuing decades gradually lowering himself into the gutter. His story illustrates why we can’t have a responsible or at least slightly less hysterical conservative media.
The Daily Caller, the site he launched with a promise to offer a new model for conservative journalism, is primarily a catalog of sleazy traffic-baiting aggregated Web garbage (“Top 10: Most beautiful ‘most beautiful’ women “), ancient relics of online commentary with nowhere else left to publish (Ann Coulter, Mickey Kaus), and overblown scandal-mongering headlines that promise much more than they can deliver. In other words it is like a mean-spirited parody of a conservative version of the pre-AOL Huffington Post, with a healthy dose, recently, of attention-grabbing race baiting.
The Daily Caller, the site he launched with a promise to offer a new model for conservative journalism, is primarily a catalog of sleazy traffic-baiting aggregated Web garbage (“Top 10: Most beautiful ‘most beautiful’ women “), ancient relics of online commentary with nowhere else left to publish (Ann Coulter, Mickey Kaus), and overblown scandal-mongering headlines that promise much more than they can deliver. In other words it is like a mean-spirited parody of a conservative version of the pre-AOL Huffington Post, with a healthy dose, recently, of attention-grabbing race baiting.
Some of Carlson's past hits include hyping the now forgotten "Journolist" fracas into a numbers-driver for The Daily Caller- after he was turned down for membership; getting nostalgic over some gay-bashing on MSNBC; calling for pro football player Michael Vick to get the chair for dogfighting; fretting that if Don't Ask Don't Tell was repealed, Muslim soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn't take their American advisers seriously; sending videos of three interviews with quixotic 2010 SC Senate candidate Alvin Green to a "body language expert"; running articles on strippers and the "13 foxiest first ladies"; pretending MSNBC news host Rachel Maddow is a man; and thinking about running for president in '08 as a Libertarian. Oh, and hosting a bunch of cable news shows that failed.
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