The worst thing about Tucker, like I say, I have no beef against anybody.
The worst thing about what he did was
the ruthless pragmaticism that he displayed.
I'm gonna do this because that's what the audience wants.
In other words, it wasn't the malevolent media leading the audience,
it was the audience leading the malevolent media.
>> Speaker 2: That's right, audience capture is a hell of a problem.
And as we learned through the dominion lawsuit against Fox News,
Tucker Carlson and other hosts at Fox were definitely captured by their audience,
which is why they told their audience exactly what they wanted to hear
about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
That it was allegedly stolen from Donald Trump,
even though there wasn't a shred of evidence proving that.
Now, Geraldo Rivera joined Mediaite's podcast to discuss his exit from Fox and
also dish about some of his foes, including Tucker Carlson,
Donald Trump and Greg Gutfeld.
But what's incredible about this conversation is that he seems to not have
many bad feelings about the fact that he was fired from the Five over at Fox.
His harshest criticism was actually saved for Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump.
So without further ado, here he is going after Tucker Carlson for
his irresponsible coverage of the January 6 riots.
>> Speaker 3: Why do you think he was able to do things like the January 6 coverage,
which I ratings, right?
>> Speaker 1: Yeah, but he was very powerful.
And in the discovery in the Dominion lawsuit, you see how arrogant he was,
how contemptuous he was of trying to do the right thing and
losing the audience and how naïve certain producers or
certain reporters were when they complained of his book.
It was pathetic, really pathetic.
He got way too big for his britches, what he did was unforgivable.
Basically, he made a mockery of the tenets of journalism.
He seemed to me to willfully embrace something he did
not sincerely believe in because it resulted in higher ratings.
It stopped the hemorrhaging of the ratings from Fox to NewsMax.
>> Speaker 2: I love that the topic of audience capture is getting a lot more
attention because the fact of the matter is it takes a lot of courage.
It takes a brave person to tell their audience what they don't wanna hear,
that's what a person with integrity does.
And Tucker Carlson, for all his tough talk, clearly did not have the courage or
the integrity to do the right thing and tell his audience what he
was actually talking about behind the scenes with his producers,
about how Trump is pathetic, that he lost the election,
can't wait till the day he doesn't have to talk about Trump anymore.
And by the way, after Tucker Carlson left Fox News because he was fired,
the 8 PM time slot hasn't recovered.
So Fox News saw a 50% drop in ratings at the 8 PM hour in
the immediate aftermath of Carlson's ouster in April.
On his last night on the network, Carlson drew 2.65 million viewers in primetime,
which dropped to 2.59 million and then 1.3 million in the following days.
So David talk to me a little bit about this, because first,
comment on audience capture without even having to get into Tucker Carlson,
because I'm curious if you've experienced any of that yourself.
Like, if maybe went a little out of bounds and
didn't completely go along with the orthodoxy,
like have you experienced that and what has that experience been like?
>> Speaker 1: Sure, I mean, there have been different organizations I've worked
for where there was certainly pressure to appeal to what the audience wanted.
I don't think it was as overt as what Tucker Carlson was engaged in.
But this is to know full disclosure, I worked with Tucker Carlson at MSNBC,
and that was his second stop after he had lost his job.
And been embarrassed at CNN for trying to do his sort of independent brand of
journalism that he was known for originally as a print reporter.
Well, he gets fired and embarrassed by John Stewart at CNN,
then Tucker goes to MSNBC, he tries to do his own independent thing there and
gets fired again and embarrassed.
And for those of us who were friends with him back then,
even though we had [COUGH] clearly different political views and
different views about the business, something snapped at Tucker.
It's almost as if he thought that if he was gonna get another shot,
which he did at Fox, he was not gonna play the journalism game.
He was gonna play the other game in terms of appealing only to your audience and
he was gonna be smart about it and he was gonna give them more and more and
push the boundaries and see how much he could get away with.
And he certainly got away with incredible things at Fox News.
And so it's almost as if he turned into somebody that many of us who knew him 15
years ago didn't recognize.
And I think this is sort of a warning sign to people who become incredibly powerful,
get a lot of attention, make a ton of money, they think they are invincible, and
they forget about the principles that they adhered to originally that I think
drove Tucker Carlson into the news business to begin with.
>> Speaker 2: Look, and it does suck because the principles,
the integrity, oftentimes it feels like it doesn't get rewarded, right?
It feels like you get punished for it.
And what gets rewarded is the junk food that
various hosts like to dole out to their audience.
And so he went in that direction, but I think the truth always wins in the end,
and obviously it didn't work out so well for him.
He ended up getting fired from Fox News, and
his lies on air led to an unprecedented settlement toward dominion for
the defamation lawsuit that they had filed against Fox.
But I wanna move on to Geraldo, also talking about other relationships
he had over at Fox, including shaky relationship with Greg Gutfeld,
which is the least shocking thing on the planet.
Let's watch.
>> Speaker 5: I have heard rumblings from Fox News insiders that the tension was
between you and Fox's Greg Gutfeld, who at one point actually berated you on
Twitter for objecting to Tucker Carlson's coverage of January 6.
What happened there?
>> Speaker 1: Well, I don't wanna focus in on any particular person.
You could read the record, but I can tell you what happened visa vis me and Tucker.
I was shocked and outraged, I mean, I was nauseous over
Tucker Carlson's premise that January 6 was an inside job,
which was preposterous, it was ridiculous.
I actually said it was bullshit.
And so I was suspended for that,
I was suspended whenever Gutfeld and I had a head to head.
>> Speaker 2: It is amazing,
because he immediately went back to talking about Tucker Carlson.
So it's clear that he's had some deep issues with Tucker Carlson and
also clearly deep issues with Fox News.
After he got taken off The Five, he ended up leaving Fox.
And later in the interview, which you guys should check out,
we'll include a link in the description box, and
you can watch the full interaction between Media Matters and Geraldo Rivera.
But later, he also said in the interview that he hopes that Trump will drop out of
the presidential race in exchange for President Joe Biden pardoning him in all
of these criminal cases, or at least the criminal cases that he can pardon him on.
And those are the federal cases, not the state indictments.
What do you think about that, final words on this, David?
>> Speaker 4: Geraldo wants the country to move on, so I disagree.
I think justice should prevail and Donald Trump should face the music.
But I appreciate where Geraldo's coming from as far as Greg Gutfeld is concerned.
And again, there's a difference between Greg Gutfeld and Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson was once a journalist.
Geraldo Rivera was once a journalist, a global charting correspondent for
ABC News, and he went through his show ridiculousness with Al Capone, and
then he went back to sort of being a journalist at Fox News and
covering the war in Afghanistan.
That's very different from what I know about Greg Gutfeld.
I mean, he's been there for 20 years at Fox News.
I don't think Greg Gutfeld has ever been in the field and
had the responsibility of actually interviewing people and searching for
the truth and checking documents and checking sources, that's not his shtick.
And so I can see why there would be tension with Greg Gutfeld to begin with,
because I don't think that and he certainly doesn't have the background to
warrant being able to comment on things like the Trump indictment,
which Gutfeld has said is bogus.
Well, what basis do you have to say that, Greg Gutfeld?
You don't have any basis as a journalist to say that.
So I get the tensions between Geraldo and Gutfeld.