Tucker Carlson is full of righteous indignation about Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood liberals who, according to the right wing and Fox News, “enabled” Weinstein’s conduct. Meanwhile, Carlson continues to avoid any mention of those at Fox News whose alleged enabled misbehavior wasn’t all that different from Weinstein’s.
On Tuesday, October 10th, Carlson went on a righteous rant about Weinstein. Naturally, he noted that Weinstein was part of left-wing political circles. (Roger Ailes was an influential figure in GOP circles.) While Fox’s sexual harassment scandals received scant coverage from the defenders of family values, Carlson brayed that “Reactions from self-described defenders of women have been so muted.” Carlson called for a Dept. of Justice investigation into that culture of “systematic sexual abuse” but didn’t call for the same scrutiny of the culture of sexual harassment, spanning decades, at Fox News.
On Wednesday, October 11th, Carlson went on another righteous rant about Weinstein. He claimed that “all” of Hollywood knew about Weinstein. (According to the sexual harassment suits, filed against Fox News, the company’s top brass knew about Ailes and O’Reilly.)
In expressing the perfunctory right-wing umbrage over evil, liberal Hollywood and the Obamas, Carlson said, “Hollywood protected and legitimized Harvey Weinstein with the active help of Democratic Party luminaries like Barack and Michelle Obama.” (Yet Carlson was just bursting with love for Ailes.)
During his later screed, Carlson also discussed another Hollywood persona who was convicted of a sex crime yet remained in good standing in Hollywood. Carlson could have been describing the misogynistic sexual culture of Fox News when he asserted that “the powerful prey upon the week.”
But even more than his on-air hypocrisy, Carlson’s outraged tweets vividly demonstrate the double standard. You could eliminate Harvey Weinstein’s name and substitute Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Eric Bolling and come up with, dare I say, GOP sexual harassment.
But in Tucker Carlson’s world, not all sexual harassment is created equal?!
Oh, and then there are the sexual harassment allegations against Donald Trump…ssshhhhh…….
Check out Carlson’s tweets. He could have talking about Fox News!
A good topic for podcasts and terrestrial radio: Sexual harassment in radio and television, and how the network’s male stars stay quiet. Use this demonic network as a example.
