MRC Cheers Tucker Carlson’s Attacks (And Resulting Threats) On A Reporter

The Media Research Center doesn’t merely hate journalists who refuse to be right-wing shills, it has no problem with them being the target of violent threats for said refusal — which we already know. That hasn’t stopped, as the MRC has been cheering Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s attacks on journalists.

The latest round actually started last July, when Carlson claimed to be unnerved by the New York Times doing a story on him — or, in the words of the MRC’s Nicholas Fondacaro, “he exposed how the radically leftist New York Times had assigned a so-called ‘journalist’ and photographer to hunt him down, find out where he lives, and print it for all his haters to find him.” Actually, the Times never published Carlson’s address — and then Carlson’s viewers unearthed personal information about the Times reporters working on the story and harassed them. Apparently Fondacaro is totally cool with that.

On March 10, Waters huffed that another Times reporter, “self-appointed social media hall monitor” Taylor Lorenz was a “hypocritical snitch” for complaining about being an online target, playing the blame-the-victim card by highlighting a Washington Examiner commentary headlined “Taylor Lorenz Did This To Herself.” 

And what did Lorenz do to warrant such attacks? She apparently committed a minor act of misattribution that kicked off a campaign of hate against her, which kicked off an online hate campaign against her. In February, Waters went after Lorenz for being a “politically correct hall-monitor” because that misattribution came in a story about politically incorrect speech on the invitation-only social media app Clubhouse, which she found a way to infiltrate.

In a March 11 post, Fondacaro touted Carlson’s attack Lorenz, for complaining that Carlson sicced his followers on them:

What started out as a small section of a larger segment about elites claiming they were somehow oppressed during Tuesday’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, blew up Wednesday after The New York Times and social media reporter Taylor Lorenz claimed the Fox News host directed online harassment at her. But during his show later that night, Carlson shot back at the newspaper for absurdly equating criticism to harassment when they were the ones who harassed his family last summer by trying to dox them.

In fact, there was no evidence presented that the Times ever tried to dox Carlson, and Fondacaro did not explain how, exactly, the Times “harassed” Carlson’s family. And he forgot to mention that Carlson effectively sicced his followers on the Times reporters to dox them.

Fondacaro pretended that no reporter has ever been unjustly criticized by anyone on Fox News and scyophantically repeated Carlson’s defense and his attack on a Times statement defending Lorenz:

In the statement in question, The Times claimed “Tucker Carlson opened his show last night by attacking a journalist” and described it as “a calculated and cruel tactic, which he regularly deploys to unleash a wave of harassment and vitriol at his intended target.”

“We were embarrassed for Taylor Lorenz. She spends her entire life on the internet, so, of course, after a while, you become a deeply unhappy narcissist. That’s what the internet does to people,” Carlson explained. “And we assumed her bosses would be embarrassed for her too. Little did we know, that they are all exactly like she is.”

After denouncing harassment and saying he would condemn a mob bearing down on her home (which happened to him), Carlson debunked what she claimed was harassment:

So Carlson — and, thus, Fondacaro — doesn’t think that doxxing reporters and sending them death threats because they didn’t like something that was reported constitute “harassment”? Interesting.

Jeffrey Lord tried on pile on in a March 13 post with more blame-the-victim ranting: “One doesn’t know whether to laugh at the ridiculous Lorenz tweet or The Times statement. It is The Times itself, not to mention all manner of left-wing television and print/Internet outlets that routinely ‘unleash a wave of harassment and vitriol’ at Tucker. The Times loves to write articles reporting on Tucker advertisers who have been intimidated by leftists into leaving. It has outright lied in saying that he ‘derides immigrants.’ On and on go the attacks. Even on his home, with his wife quivering inside.” He concluding by spouting a right-wing talking point: that this episode proves “the American left – in particular The New York Times – wants to silence conservative media. Period and for good.”

Then, in a March 15 post, Donovan Newkirk pretended the undisputed claim that Carlson’s attacks on journalists isn’t true. When a CNN analyst noted that “when Tucker Carlson puts you on his target board, people throw out crazy threats and death threats,” he sneered in response, “Apparently stating someone’s name more than once in a sentence constitutes endangering the welfare of ‘a lot’ of people.”

Yep, the MRC would be quite happy if a deranged Tucker fan followed through on threats and harmed a reporter Tucker targeted.