politics

Does Anyone Get America Like Tucker Carlson?

We tuned in to MSNBC last night, forgetting that we would likely encounter Tucker Carlson, and his nonsensical brand of fact-free analysis.

November 7, 2006

Tucker Carlson

We’re with Jack Shafer, who wrote yesterday that despite the fact that by Election Day reporters have already filed every election story they possibly can, on Tuesday, “across the country, tens of thousands of column inches will be sacrificed by talented, exhausted writers pumping nothingness out of the void and calling it news.”

So true, as even the most cursory scan of this morning’s headlines would attest. Still, this largely recycled, relatively news-less news coverage in our newspapers seems downright thoughtful compared to the insipid, eleventh-hour offerings of cable talk shows, those wonderful repositories of the ridiculous, the mindless, and the hilarious.

All three traits were in abundant evidence last night on MSNBC’s Hardball, when host Chris Matthews got into a back-and-forth with the perplexingly still-employed Tucker Carlson. The subject? President’s Bush’s popularity in the Western states, and how that’s tied up with religion, and how the nation’s West is different from the East. (Yawn.) It was a riot of exampleless assertions, vague generalizations, and opinions masquerading as some kind of poor man’s version of a David Brooks cultural critique.

CARLSON: The difference between East and West is the difference between America and Europe. Old and new. The newer states, the mountain West, for instance, California because it is a coastal state doesn’t really count and neither does Oregon and neither does Washington.

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MATTHEWS: Montana is hipper than California.

CARLSON: Colorado. I’m saying, it is actually less hip. But it is more — that is the difference. The states that played out and decadent and depleted like Rhode Island …

[further in the banter]

CARLSON: … that is the difference. The old cultures versus the new culture.

MATTHEWS: The old cultures don’t like this guy from Texas.

CARLSON: No, because they see him as radical and see him as religious. And that has always been the dividing line. People hate him because they see him as evangelical.

Got that? According to Carlson, Western states are “new,” and so represent the real America, unless they’re the westernmost states like California, Oregon and Washington, which are somehow “old” like the easternmost states, which in turn are like Europe. (Robert Kagan would be so proud.)

And if you were in the mood for some more empty “analysis,” MSNBC didn’t disappoint. Chuck Todd was next up to generalize about religion and region, and, like Carlson, he never bothered to support his argument.

TODD: It is community thing. If your church is the community center, if that’s where you go play basketball on Wednesday nights, and has nothing to do with worship. Then you’re more likely to like President Bush. If your community center has nothing to do with God or Jesus or anything like, then you’re probably living east of the Mississippi in these urban centers and you don’t like President Bush.

MATTHEWS: You’re talking to a guy who used to play basketball at Saint Cecilia’s every week. That places me on the far right. Good analysis here.

And thus passed another night of “good analysis” on the nation’s cable frequencies.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.