Tucker Carlson returns with a message about free speech a few weeks after being unceremoniously fired from FOX News: He’s starting a new show on Twitter.
TUCKER CARLSON: You often hear people say the news is full of lies, but that’s not exactly right. Much of what you see on television or read in the New York Times is, in fact, true in the literal sense. It could pass one of the media’s own “fact checks.” Lawyers would be willing to sign off on it, in fact, they may have. But that doesn’t make it true. It’s not true.
At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie. A lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind. Facts have been withheld on purpose, along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated.
How does that work? Let’s see. If I tell you that a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery, that is not, strictly speaking, a lie. He may have been framed. At this point, there has been no trial so no one can really say. But if I don’t mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for the same crime six times before, am I really informing you? No, I’m not. I’m misleading you.
And that’s what the news media are doing. In every story that matters, every day of the week, every week of the year? What’s it like to work in a system like that? After more than 30 years in the middle of it, we could tell you stories.
The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can. But there are always limits. And you know if you bump up against those limits often enough you will be fired for it. That’s not a guess, that’s guaranteed. Every person who works in English language media understands that. The rule of what you can’t say defines everything.
It’s filthy really, and it is utterly corrupting. You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true. Speech is the fundamental prerequisite for democracy. That’s why it’s enshrined in the first of our Constitutional amendments. Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech.
The last big one remaining in the world, the only one, is Twitter, where we are right now.
