For the past week, people have been talking about the abrupt firings of Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson at CNN and Fox, respectively, and really the lesson learned here is that both of those hosts likely got what was coming to them.
National talk radio was ablaze with the babbling ballyhoos complaining that Carlson’s dismissal was akin to an assassination and in the same breath praised CNN for “finally getting it right.”
Al Sharpton then went before every live microphone he could find to castigate CNN for daring to fire a prominent Black man.
“With the health of our democracy undergoing perhaps its greatest test, we cannot afford to silence his voice,” Sharpton was quoted as saying by the New York Post.
What? A guy who has consistently made misogynistic comments on air gets canned and now the very concept of democracy is at stake?
Then, of course the hens over at “The View” had to cackle their take on the firings as well with host Sunny Hostin claiming none of it “made any sense” when referring to Lemon’s media martyrdom.
Now, I personally do not know what Tucker Carlson’s role in the Dominion lawsuit was, but I can assure you that if a story with my byline associated with it cost my company such a hideous amount of money, I would be out of a job with the striking of the gavel.
The Drudge Report and Daily Mail are running reports that Carlson’s texts and emails containing racist language factored into the defamation lawsuit by Dominion against Fox.
When it comes to Lemon, as a newsroom boss, I would never allow someone who constantly talks down to women, or anyone else for that matter, an open camera and anchor chair. The moment he suggested a 50 something Nikki Haley was too old to run for president while promoting a shriveled up old White guy for the same office should have been the moment that Lemon was shown the door.
The reality is that Lemon and Carlson are just the left and right wing on the same bird. They both tend to fly over and dump their propaganda on the windshield of a freshly washed vehicle. These talking heads are not there to tell the truth, they are there to gain viewers.
Fox News, MSNBC, CNN etc. all have narratives and talking points; profit margins mean that sometimes, in fact, many times, the full truth has to take a back seat to sell the narrative. These talking heads do not exist to tell the public the truth but rather spin their company’s version of truth.
The only reason why MSNBC’s Joy Reid has been on the air for years with virtually no ratings must be that she, and her brand of politics, are a draw for advertisers.
This is nothing new. American media has often been biased. Reporters are human beings, not robots, and now we are finding out that even robots, artificial intelligence, can develop bias as well.
A report by the World Economic Forum states, “bias in AI algorithms can emanate from unrepresentative or incomplete training data or the reliance on flawed information that reflects historical inequalities. If left unchecked, biased algorithms can lead to decisions which can have a collective, disparate impact on certain groups of people even without the programmer’s intention to discriminate.”
When we first started The Augusta Press, our managing editor, Charmain Brackett, literally wanted an attribution on every sentence. As a reader, I found it sometimes redundant and as a writer, it was ponderous.
However, Charmain was right. She wanted to create a policy that The Augusta Press presents an accurate telling of the truth without bias whether intentional or not. It has now become ingrained in our reporters to simply document the truth and seek out sources from all sides.
We don’t have “stars” at The Augusta Press, only journalists and columnists.
The “Stars” seen in the national media have entire production teams that literally script everything they say. They are not journalists but merely talking heads that can eloquently read a TelePrompter.
It is when these “stars” go off-script that they bare their ignorance and get themselves in trouble.
However, don’t feel bad for either Carlson or Lemon; both cried their way to the bank, to quote Liberace, and both will likely be back on some form of media as if they never went away.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
