Opinion: Tucker Carlson’s firing should not impact your life.
———-
If you’ve managed to avoid the headlines about both Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon being fired recently, I applaud you. The rock you live under or the hermit cave you call home must be awfully nice. For the rest of us, the stories have been practically inescapable. I pride myself on keeping up with the news, but over the past several weeks, I’ve gotten sick of seeing various types of analyses on the situation. So what better way to solve the problem than to join the masses and give my own take on the situation?
Ever since I started learning about journalism in my freshman year of high school, one lesson has been hammered into my brain over and over again: stay unbiased. As an opinion writer now, I’m a bit more removed from that idea, but the basic principles of journalism remain the same. Just like a sworn testimony, news reporting should be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A pretty simple concept, wouldn’t you say so?
But apparently the general population has some trouble understanding this idea, and that’s particularly evident in the wake of Carlson’s firing. His show was the second most popular on cable television, so it makes some sense that his termination led to backlash. Even though he gives me the impression that it would hurt him to think if he ever tried, he has fans. Since his departure from Fox News, there have been calls for a boycott of the network. As someone who’s in the middle of a lifelong Fox boycott, this behavior is bizarre. Any journalist or reporter doing their job correctly shouldn’t inspire such a massive wave of cult-like worship.
In some ways, the firings were important. Lemon was fired following his unsavory and frankly insulting comments about women, and Carlson has defended almost too many prejudiced opinions to count. It’s important to show that this behavior isn’t okay and leads to real consequences. But would we all hear about it if an average, competent, unbiased journalist was fired? You know we wouldn’t.
In that way, these cable news hosts have a far outsized impact and clog up our channels of information with a ton of hot air. There’s a difference between journalists who we listen to because of their exemplary contributions to the field (hello, Woodward and Bernstein) and TV “reporters” who shout misinformation into the empty minds of millions. Unfortunately, many of the talking heads we see on cable news fall into the second category.
As I see it, the ideal journalist is almost invisible. When I wrote news articles in high school, I always did my best to make sure the facts and my words were the most important part of each piece, not me. Obviously there’s a difference between writing for a high school paper and hosting a cable show, but if people like Carlson want to call themselves reporters, they should focus more on informing the public in an honest way and improving the substance of their stories, not building up their own image. Journalism isn’t supposed to be about you as a content creator, but about unfettered access to the truth. Show me a famous cable “news” reporter, and I’ll show you someone failing the basic requirements of their job.