gatorfan wrote:
Like left-wingers don't latch onto nut cases too? So much bias. Besides TC is in the entertainment industry, I'm sure he loves just riling up the hypersensitive left wingers. It's pretty easy, just like the righties.
I don't know of any left-winger who (A) obsesses nearly as many left-wingers as much as right-wing talking heads obsess their audience, and (B) is peddling the kind of poison Tucker Carlson does.
Honestly, left-wing and right-wing have two different personality types. Right-wingers are far more drawn to being "told" things. They like to be told stories, they like being led. That's why left-wing talk radio has never really caught on, even though, demographically, the country leans slightly more liberal. Remember "Air America," that was an attempt to counter Limbaugh/Hannity/Levin? It never caught on, and not because there's not an audience for it, but because that audience doesn't feel the need for a "shepherd." I trace that back to church, really... church is a training ground for abdicating a lot of your own decision-making to someone else.
The closest I can think of on the left would be Rachel Maddow, I guess. I don't even watch her, and know few people who do on a regular basis, but she does have fans. I've checked her out before, and she's not comparable to Tucker. She sticks pretty much exclusively to facts, and there's not a whole lot of conjecture. Tucker's almost ALL conjecture. He's "the boogeyman is comin'!" and he plays witch-doctor to stir up terror over all kinds of things that
might happen, and a heavy reliance on confirmation bias -- his audience
already thinks that they're "losing their world" to folks with more melanin, and he just tells 'em "Yep!" and the money rolls right in. Maddow seems pretty good at what she does, but her audience doesn't seem to watch her in the same way that Tucker's do to his show.
So, I dunno. I don't think there's nearly the same level of "taking orders from the TV" on the left as there is on the right. The left does have some kooks -- every group does, and the left's irritate me almost as much as the right's -- but is there really anything that gets even close to something like "QAnon" over there? I don't think movements like that find much fertile ground to grow in on the left. Like I said, it's a different personality type. I don't think it's an equivalent problem.
Meanwhile, shouldn't the right be
rejecting a guy like Tucker more? We agree he's a nutcase... so why does he get the most ratings on FOX, if he's not representing something a lot of the right's got a market for?
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