MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough shamed former House speaker Paul Ryan and other Fox News board members for allowing top-rated host Tucker Carlson to spew white nationalist slogans.
The “Morning Joe” host earlier on Monday obliquely blamed “a powerful cable news network” for a racist gun massacre in Buffalo, but he later explicitly blamed Carlson and Fox News for promoting the white nationalist “replacement theory” and other extremist ideas.
“No public figure has promoted replacement theory more loudly and relentlessly than Tucker Carlson, who made demographic change a theme of the show since joining the lineup in 2016,” said co-host Mika Brzezinski, reading from a recent New York Times profile of the broadcaster. “A Times investigation published this month showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Mr. Carlson has amplified the notion that democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration. Producers sometimes scoured the raw material from the same corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did. It is creeping into everyone’s daily viewing across America, fair to say. I don’t know if — I guess that’s the mainstream. It is prevalent in a lot of very widely followed figures in media.”
Scarborough said the problem was even worse than that.
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“Well, I wouldn’t call it creeping in,” he said. “It is busting in the door, busting through the door. What was so fascinating about the story was that it was actually Fox News executives who were scouring the minutes and trying to push that sort of programming on day side, trying to move that sort of programming across all of the network. Minute by minute to see the ratings, what was working. The Fox News executives were then trying to push that across the entire channel. This is not an isolated case.”
This is the Murdochs and this is members of the board like Paul Ryan, this is their plan,” Scarborough added. “They’ve quite deliberately — if the reporting in the Times is correct, if the people who worked at Fox News are accurate in what they’re saying, this is a network-wide plan, from Rupert Murdoch down. If you read that story and believe that story, the plan is not to just keep it in primetime, but to spread it across the entire channel. That’s what Paul Ryan on the board is obviously — I guess he supports that. I know Paul very well, I didn’t know — sort of surprising, but that’s what Paul Ryan, board member, must support. Certainly what the New York Times reports Rupert Murdoch supports.”