How Ben Smith got played by Tucker Carlson at the Semafor-Knight event this morning
“This is why you are considered correctly a propagandist and not a journalist.” No, that wasn’t Ben Smith, the co-founder of Semafor, a new global news site, admonishing Tucker Carlson, the lead anchor for Fox News, during a “pre-launch” event held in Washington, DC this morning to explore the future of news. It was Carlson, who is a much more practiced cable pugilist than Smith, putting him down midway through their conversation. Sadly, and exactly as many of us expected, Carlson used the platform offered him by Semafor and its co-sponsor, the Knight Foundation, to do what he does every night: twist facts and arguments to make his brand of American white nationalism seem like common sense against the deplorable efforts of the liberal media and the Democratic party.
For just over 20 minutes Carlson got to parade a series of self-aggrandizing statements with barely any contradiction or successful interjection from Smith. To wit, he told the audience such chestnuts as “the fact that there’s only one TV channel in the entire country, a country of 350 million people that allows actual free speech,” “the center of the Democratic electoral strategy going forward” is to replace “legacy Americans” with more “obedient” foreigners; and my personal favorite, “I’m trying my very hardest to tell the truth.”
Carlson, like the man he admires so much, Donald Trump, is an expert at projection and displacement. “I’m not a racist,” he likes to claim, as he goes out of his way to charge the Democratic party with demonizing white people. Today with Smith, here’s how that came out. Smith asked if Carlson worried that America was getting too divided, adding politely, “I think and maybe this is maybe I’m wrong, but that your audience enjoys it when you kind of pour gasoline on those fires, not when you try to put them out and I wonder, like, the nature of cable news ratings. It’s so funny. I wonder if the nature of cable of the sort of ratings driven business of cable cable news in general of yours in particular, I mean, this seriously, you know, basically makes it impossible to do anything else.” In other words, maybe Tucker you’re not really a believer in the stuff you put out, but you need to do it for ratings. C’mon, you can tell me.
Carlson, who is an expert at posturing as a real journalist, was having nothing of it. First he claimed to not know his own ratings or how to read a ratings report. Then, he insisted he wasn’t pouring gasoline on the fire by pointing out that the Biden Administration is “draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve” to sell some of it to China. Ha! And then, as Smith followed up asking if there was anything he favored to reduce polarization, Carlson insisted he was in favor of “de-racializing” the discourse. And he went straight from that to claiming that “The conversation on the Democratic Party is like, it’s white people, white men versus everybody else.”
Last week, I wrote a post here criticizing Semafor and Knight for deciding to give Carlson a platform at this event. Saturday, Smith — who I’ve known since the early 2000s, DMed me to complain that I hadn’t touched base with him first, and to argue that “me grilling him is more useful than yet another gathering of liberal media types congratulating ourselves on our purity.” I disagreed, saying that the advance framing of the event, positively positioning Carlson as just a top “media figure” rather than someone doing active damage to democracy, was the problem. I did say I’d watch and was prepared to change my mind if somehow the event turned out differently.
Alas, it’s obvious that the one who got grilled this morning was Smith, not Carlson. None of Ben’s questions landed. Carlson spoke over him constantly, laughed at him, and essentially dominated the conversation.
Wesley Lowery, a Washington Post journalist who was on a panel just before the Smith-Carlson one-on-one, had a much clearer sense of what was at stake today, noting, “We spend so much time in our business trying to appease lunatics instead of just telling the truth.” Indirectly chiding Smith for his well-known backchannel relationship with Carlson, Lowery also said, “We’re not trying to build community with the Nazis as they march us to camps and not calling Goebbels for comment to see if he’ll talk to us on background and tell our Jewish colleagues ‘stop tweeting about the death camps, now Hitler’s not returning my calls on background.’”
Micah Sifry is a Medium columnist and the author of several books on tech and politics, including The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet) and WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. He also writes a weekly newsletter called The Connector, where he focuses on movements, organizing and democracy. You can also follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.
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