Speaker 1: Fired Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson is coming back.
He is relaunching his show on Twitter.
What the hell with Twitter.
What does that make NBC?
I don't know.
Here is Tucker Carlson's announcement now viewed nearly 20 million times.
He made the announcement on Twitter, I guess, partnering with Elon Musk to relaunch, telling
a number of corrosive lies.
Let's take a look at Tucker's big announcement.
Filmed in Ultra widescreen, they've never seen widescreen this wide.
Apparently from his cabin in Maine or Florida.
Who knows?
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2: Hey, it's Tucker Carlson.
You often hear people say the news is full of lies.
But most of the time, that's not exactly right.
Much of what you see on television or read 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 stealthy, highest 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's 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 misleading you.
And that's what the news media are doing.
Speaker 1: And what's really funny about this is that it's a very fair criticism.
Of the way that Fox News, including Tucker Carlson, present news stories and have done
so since they launched and what it was in 1996 or 1997.
It's quite I mean, he's right about everything he's saying.
The problem is he's as guilty as anyone of exactly what he's calling out here.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: What a victim.
What a poor guy.
Speaker 2: 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 that if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for
it.
Speaker 1: So now Tucker is arguing he was fired for bumping up against the limits valiantly
and bravely, trying to tell us the truth.
But I guess someone didn't really want him to do that or something.
I mean, this you could only believe this if you followed absolutely nothing of what's
been going on with Tucker Carlson for the last decade.
Speaker 2: That's not a guess.
It'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.
Right.
And it's 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.
Speaker 1: There aren't.
That's surprising to many people.
Speaker 2: That's the big one remaining in the world.
The only one is Twitter.
Speaker 1: How can where.
Speaker 2: We are now?
Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops.
Twitter is not a partizan site.
Everybody's allowed here and we think that's a good thing.
And yet for the Who's this week, by the way, was part.
The news that you see analyzed on Twitter comes from media organizations that are themselves
thinly disguised propaganda outlets like Fox.
You see it on cable news.
You talk about it on Twitter.
The result may feel like a debate, but actually the gatekeepers are still in charge.
We think that's a bad system.
We know exactly how it works and we're sick of it.
Starting soon, we'll be bringing a new version of the show we've been doing for the last
six and a half years to Twitter.
We bring some other things, too, which we'll tell you about.
But for now, we're just grateful to be here.
Free speech is the main right that you have.
Without it, you have no others.
Soon.
Speaker 1: There you go.
So Tucker Carlson bravely announcing that he will be coming to Twitter.
Now, I will mention that Elon Musk in response to this tweeted, I want to be clear, we have
not signed a deal of any kind whatsoever.
Tucker is subject to the same rules and rewards of all content creators.
Rewards means subscriptions and ad revenue share.
Still working on software needed for Ladder, which is a function of how many people subscribe
and the ad views associated with the content.
I hope that many others, particularly from the left, also choose to be content creators
on this platform.
Listen, I'd love to learn more about that.
We've never been there's never been ad revenue available to us that we've been aware of on
Twitter, which is interesting.
I'd like to learn more.
So listen, this is Tucker's big return.
I don't know to what extent this is the most profitable avenue for him.
I just don't know.
I need to learn a little more about it.
But it is very clear that this is the continued refrain from the right that pre Elon Musk
Twitter was not for free speech.
It was not a so-called free speech platform.
The speech of conservatives was unfairly limited.
But now we can all rejoice and pray at the altar of Elon Musk because he has saved Twitter,
made it a free speech platform once again.
Now, when you look at that algorithmic for you feed on Twitter, you very quickly realize
that it has overwhelmingly become a platform that feeds you right wing drivel from some
of the folks I mentioned when we talked about this on the Lex Friedman podcast, including
Brigitte Gabriel and others.
For some reason, I always have shown her stuff, even though I don't follow her.
So this is Tucker's big announcement.
I'm interested from a media critique perspective of seeing how it goes.
I'm interested in seeing whether people do shows on Twitter, which is sort of a new concept.
And we're going to follow it.
Make sure you're subscribed on the platforms that we have not abandoned at this point in
time, which include, of course, YouTube, Tik Tok, Snapchat, and many, many others.
We'll take a quick break and be back right after this.