You’ve got to feel at least a bit sorry for Tucker Carlson. He gets his ass handed to him by Jon Stewart a few years back, and subsequently gets his show – Crossfire – cancelled. Generally, in this situation (at least in my opinion), the high road would be to admit defeat, and actually listen to the criticism – that as a journalist, he failed miserably in actually presenting balanced arguments and asking real, hard questions of his guests. But Tucker’s pride is apparently too strong for that, and after Stewart’s recent skewering of CNBC’s ‘Mad Money’ host Jim Cramer for cheerleading soon-to-fall financial giants like Bear-Stearns and AIG when he should have known better, he took his bowtie back into the ring with a stunningly infantile screed on Jon Stewart, entitled “How Jon Stewart Went Bad“.
It really is a shame that after such an ass-kicking, Tucker couldn’t have just looked the other way- but his article is absolutely missing the point. It truly is a sad state of affairs when a marginal comedian hosting a fake news show actually asks the hard questions that Jim Cramer should have, and Tucker certainly should have back when he got his own dressing-down. It’s not about Jon Stewart and his liberal bias – which he wears on his sleeve, and it’s not even remotely Jon blaming the recent financial meltdown on Jim Cramer personally (which of course he didn’t) – it’s the fact that supposedly objective journalists like Cramer were really in the tank for gasbags Bear-Stearns and AIG- KNOWING they were operating in the shady realms of finance, yet still softballed them on his show to pretend the sky wasn’t falling. But Tucker misses the point entirely, and the entire article comes off as a whiny, revenge-based potshot. Sad.
Tucker should really take a lesson from Jim Cramer, who at least had the sack to stand up and take his lumps like a man, admitting he could have done much better. Denial really doesn’t suit you, Tucker. But more importantly- read the comment threads at your own article, see what people are saying about you now, and face the facts that your 15 minutes of fame ended quite a while ago, when a comedian showed you how to do your own job. You really should have left well enough alone.