DONATE TO MEDIA MATTERS' YEAR-END FUNDRAISER

Molly Butler / Media Matters 

What Tucker Carlson’s edit of Kanye

West tells us about Fox News
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
P U B L I S H E D
1 0 / 1 2 / 2 2 1 1 : 3 9 A M E DT

Fox News host Tucker Carlson clearly hoped to use his

interview with Kanye West (now known as Ye) to advance
his own political agenda by highlighting the rapper’s
“White Lives Matter” commentary and support for former
President Donald Trump. But at the conclusion of their
sit-down, Carlson had a problem: West peppered the
interview with toxic antisemitic comments, as well as
conspiracy-minded rants which suggested that he was in
the throes of one of his well-documented manic phases.
Carlson responded to this conundrum by simply cutting
the worst of West’s bigotry and paranoia from the version
of the interview he aired last week, Vice’s Motherboard
revealed on Tuesday, after obtaining original footage
from the interview. The deceptive editing points to how
much leeway the Fox host thinks he has from the network
brass, as well as the deceitful way he handles his show.

Carlson knows where the line is for

antisemitism on his show
Tucker Carlson Tonight revolves around an antisemitic
conspiracy theory. The host posits that a cabal of global
elites controls the heights of U.S. politics, media, culture,
and business, and is using its power to corrupt American
children, destroy western civilization, and replace its
population with immigrants.
Carlson’s innovation is that he generally deracinates
these familiar antisemitic tropes. While open white
supremacists might argue, for example, that Jews are
using immigration to replace the white population with a
black and brown one, Carlson tells his viewers that elites
like the financier George Soros (who is Jewish) are
replacing “legacy Americans” with people from “far-away
countries” in the “third world.”

Carlson’s stated worldview is close enough that neo-

Nazis regularly praise his show for mainstreaming their
blood-soaked positions. But Carlson’s careful use of
language, and his furious denials that he is a racist, give
the Fox brass just enough plausible deniability that they
can continue to defend and support his program. 

You can see this balance play out in what Carlson

included from his interview with West and the clips
Motherboard published that were left on the cutting room
floor. 
In: West’s suggestion that Jared Kushner, former
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and White House
aide, worked on Middle East peace to “make money” and
his comment about Jared and his brother Josh, “What
they’re about is making money.” That language aligns with
the antisemitic trope of the money-hungry Jew, but it’s
apparently palatable to Fox because West did not
specifically mention that the Kushners are Jewish (West
even asked Carlson whether those comments had been
“too heavy handed,” to which Carlson replied, “We're not in
the censorship business”).
Out: Nakedly antisemitic comments in which West more
explicitly mentioned Jews, including his statement,
“Think about us judging each other on how white we could
talk would be like, you know, a Jewish person judging
another Jewish person on how good they danced or
something” (which West himself told Carlson went too far
and asked to have edited out) and his remark, “I prefer my
kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come
with some financial engineering.” Those comments are
so obviously bigoted that they apparently could not be
aired on Fox in an interview meant to promote its
subject. 

Carlson could have responded to those comments by

changing the way he intended to frame the interview;
instead, he cut out the comments to preserve his
narrative.
Carlson’s edits left his colleagues in an uncomfortable
position, as they were apparently unaware that West’s
interview had featured naked antisemitism. Many of them
responded to the interview as it aired by praising West’s
wisdom and authenticity, and promoting his support for
right-wing ideas as a boon to their movement. They were
then forced to make an abrupt about-face after West
spent the weekend on a social media tirade against
“JEWISH PEOPLE” he claimed had “tried to black ball
anyone whoever opposes your agenda.” 

For his part, Carlson simply pretended that antisemitic

outburst had not happened when he ran another segment
praising West on his Monday broadcast. He hid the
antisemitic comments West made on social media from
his viewers, just as he had hidden the antisemitic
comments West made to his face.
 Matthew Gertz
@MattGertz · Follow
Tucker Carlson did a whole segment last night
celebrating Kanye West without mentioning his
antisemitic meltdown.

6:17 AM · Oct 11, 2022

888 Reply Copy link
Read 67 replies

Carlson knowingly lies to his audience

about West’s mental state
Carlson stressed to his viewers as he promoted his
interview with West that the rapper’s well-documented
mental health issues are a fabrication of journalists who
want to shut him up — and he presented his sit-down as
an antidote that would allow his audience to come to their
own conclusions.

“The enemies of his ideas dismissed West as they have

for years -- as mentally ill, too crazy to take seriously,” he
alleged at the top of Thursday’s show. “But is West crazy?
You can judge for yourself as you watch what we're about
to show you.”

Carlson added that he did not find West to be “crazy,”

adding, “In fact, we've rarely heard a man speak so
honestly and so movingly about what he believes, but
again, you can judge for yourself.”

Carlson returned to that theme later in the program.

“We told you at the top, you'd be able to assess for
yourself whether West is crazy, as virtually every single
media outlet on planet Earth claims every day, all year
long,” he said. “Is he crazy. As you try to assess that, ask is
what you just heard over the past 40 minutes any crazier
than what you see on television every day? The lies, the
lunacy presented to you with a straight face as reality?”

“No, he is not,” Carlson concluded. “He is not crazy at all.

He is a big thinker, though."

From the October 6, 2022,

edition of Fox News' Tucker
Carlson Tonight.
It’s easy to see why Carlson is so defensive about West’s
mental state. If West is “crazy,” in Carlson’s words, then
the Fox host is a despicable hack taking advantage of a
vulnerable person’s “lunacy” for ratings and political
advantage. 

But Carlson is being deceptive in two ways.

One is that West’s struggles with bipolar disorder are not

a media creation, but something that he has publicly
discussed in detail for years.

“When you’re in this state, you’re hyper-paranoid about

everything, everyone,” West told David Letterman in a
2019 interview. “This is my experience, other people have
different experiences. Everyone now is an actor.
Everything’s a conspiracy. You feel the government is
putting chips in your head. You feel you’re being
recorded. You feel all these things.”
The second is that West reeled off several conspiracy
theories during his interview with Carlson, as the
Motherboard videos show. He suggested, for example,
that “fake children” had been “placed into my house to
sexualize my kids,” and that the fashion house Louis
Vuitton had “killed” the designer Virgil Abloh, who died of
cancer in 2021.

Those diatribes cut against Carlson’s argument that West

is lucid, and thus an appropriate interview subject whose
political views should be taken seriously. So Carlson
edited them out of what he showed his viewers, even as
he told them that they could make their own
determination about West’s mental state from what
aired.

That’s pretty typical — Carlson is a deeply dishonest

person who has contempt for an audience he constantly
cons. The Motherboard videos are just a new and
compelling example demonstrating his duplicity.