RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/tale-two-tv-hosts-derek-hunter/

It was the best of ratings, it was the worst of ratings…

That the establishment media is left-wing is beyond debate. Hilariously, every once in a while there is some progressive “journalist” who’ll tweet something about how unfairly Joe Biden is being treated or how the New York Times is secretly a conservative outlet. It’s beyond stupid and likely done just to poke the social media bear. The reality is there is no conservative who gets an honest, fair shake from the left-wing media and we need to stop pretending there is.

This week, Vanity Fair took up residence in Rachel Maddow’s colon, running another in an endless string of profiles about the MSNBC personality (they call her a journalist, which is a testament to just how devoid of meaning that word has become), complete with photos by Annie Leibovitz. She was given such a wet kiss you’d think she were leading Ukraine in a war against Russia.

Juxtapose that to how any piece is ever written about Tucker Carlson. He is a monster and responsible for anything everyone who can be remotely connected to anything he’s ever said, even if that person confesses to having left-wing authoritarian politics. Meanwhile, miraculously, Maddow isn’t responsible at all when a super fan tries to murder as many Republicans as possible on a baseball field based on left-wing lies about health care. Weird how that works, isn’t it?

Carlson gets a long written series about how dangerous he is to the country, Maddow gets tonsil-hockey every couple of months from the same people.

Tucker’s monologues “grew” and became problematic. The New York Times wrote, “Where once he spoke for only a few minutes, sometimes in a neutral just-asking-questions mode, he now often opened the show with a lengthy stemwinder, addressing his audience as ‘you’ and the objects of his fury as a shadowy ‘they.’ Ratings data showed that the monologues were a hit with viewers, according to one former and one current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson regularly spoke directly to the camera for more than quarter of the hourlong show. Instead of less Tucker, the audience got more.”

Maddow’s show can be all monologue, a paranoid, conspiracy-laden monologue that, if you read it without a name attached to it you would assume had been composed in an institution somewhere. With that, you get this paragraph from Vanity Fair. “Maddow’s highly rated 9 p.m. show—long the crown jewel of MSNBC prime time, if not the entire network—debuted on September 8, 2008, with a handoff from then superstar Keith Olbermann, whose subsequent defenestration elevated Maddow to queen bee status. The program, known as much for its historical wonkery and sweeping monologues as its lefty bona fides, was immediately successful. But it also proved to be a massive slog. Maddow is exceptionally hands-on, and the opening of each show—the ‘A-block,’ in cable news parlance—requires an intensive level of preparation on a tight deadline. (Someone described it to me as being like ‘a bunch of people holed up studying for finals every night, like in a library, panic researching.’) Throughout the years, Maddow has usually written the A-block monologue herself, on the heels of a full day’s worth of research. In October 2010, after a particularly rollicking broadcast from a historic Delaware tavern, where the Maddow Show was covering a Senate showdown between Chris Coons and Christine O’Donnell (remember her?), an exhausted Maddow remarked to a colleague, ‘A person could only do this job for five years.’”

I wanted to present that in its entirety because it’s the only way to do that level of sycophanty justice. Were Maddow not a willing participant, that would be sexual assault – “she’s so smart, so prepared. She writes her own words! She Googles things!” Being able to search the Internet is not a positive attribute if you end up getting your information from the DailyKos or The Atlantic. Food poisoning isn’t less horrible because you got it off filet mignon from Whole Foods.

Maddow is exactly what the left accuses Tucker of being, only much more so. You want to see some unrelated dot-connecting, watch one of her monologues. If you want to see her challenged in any way, well, you won’t find it.

This hero of the left is ripe for a remake of “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” living a life more insulated than any newly built attic in the Hamptons. She simply won’t allow herself to be questioned or challenged. Lucky for her there is no appetite for it among her fans or colleagues either.

It’s good to be a liberal. Conservatives are held responsible for the actions of anyone the liberal establishment seeks to smear them with, and liberals aren’t even responsible for their own words or actions. Tucker Carlson is a monster who uses violent rhetoric to stir up hatred, yet it’s Rachel Maddow’s viewership that unambiguously shrunk by one after that day baseball practice. That’s not a coincidence.