© Fox News / YouTubeFox News host Tucker Carlson (L) interviews Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald (R)
An outspoken
Newsweek reporter went on Fox News to discuss his coverage of President-elect Donald Trump. The nine minutes of personal attacks and avoiding answers quickly went viral as the face of 2016 political coverage in America.
Kurt Eichenwald, a senior writer with
Newsweek and contributing editor at
Vanity Fair, has attracted a lot of attention this election season, from arguing that a Russian news outlet's accidental misattribution of one of his articles to Sidney Blumenthal "proved" collusion between Moscow and WikiLeaks to an equally outlandish claim that Trump had been admitted to a mental hospital in 1990.
On Thursday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson grilled Eichenwald on that claim and others, with the Newsweek writer giving him the runaround."Do you believe that you are practicing journalism?" Carlson asked at the outset, quoting some of Eichenwald's tweets. The
Newsweek writer claimed they were "out of context," then brandished a binder titled, "Tucker Carlson's Falsehoods."
Carlson then asked about the Trump mental hospital claim, and things went downhill from there.
"Do you see a little irony that on one day, you're criticizing the press for being lazy and inaccurate, and the next day you yourself are being lazy and inaccurate?" the Fox News host asked. Eichenwald kept insisting he wanted to answer the question, but never did.
"Was he in a mental hospital or not in 1990? You allege that he was. Was he or wasn't he? He wasn't, was he?" Carlson insisted.
"Can I finish, Tucker?" Eichenwald replied.
"It's a really simple question. I'm asking you to finish, sir. Answer the question," Carlson said. Instead, Eichenwald kept talking about the "reporting process" and offered no actual answer.
"I think you are humiliating yourself by your unwillingness to answer a simple question," Calrson concluded.
Following the show, Eichenwald launched into a tweet-storm, posting 46 messages on the microblogging platform before claiming to have had a seizure. The tweets were later deleted, though Twitchy archived some of them.Several of Eichenwald's colleagues were not impressed with his interview, holding him up as an example of the media's problematic behavior - and not just in the 2016 election.
Earlier this month, Eichenwald claimed that the crowd at a Trump rally booed the late John Glenn, the last of the Mercury 7 astronauts and the first American in orbit. He later retracted that claim, saying he was "in error."
Both of Eichenwald's employers, Newsweek and Vanity Fair, have been accused of partisan coverage of the president-elect. In a major embarrassment, Newsweek actually printed and distributed a special "Madam President" printed issue, certain of Clinton's victory in the November presidential election. The 125,000 copies had to be recalled from newsstands after Trump's triumph.Earlier this week,
Trump criticized Vanity Fair over the magazine's review of the restaurant at his New York headquarters, calling its editor "no talent" and describing the magazine's business as "Way down, big trouble, dead!"
If anything makes journalism look bad, it's the Fox M.O. of asking a question, demanding a yes/no answer without allowing any context, and interrupting the guests like 26 times per sentence with misleading statements, putting words in their mouths, and being generally unprofessional, derisive, and annoying as fuck.
You know, like, asking "do you believe 9/11 was an inside job?" and absolutely not allowing anything other than "yes" for an answer, not allowing any explanation, harassing the guest to no end if he does anything other than say "yes", with the sheer goal of getting the "yes" answer so that the host, whichever of the resident fucktards it is, can go, "Ahahaha, what an idiot, he believes 9/11 was an inside job. You're crazy! Ahahaha."
That, as far as I can say, it why Fox retards interview people - to make them say something specific so that they can then laugh at them. Journalism at its completely worst (if you could even call it that).
And that's exactly what was going on here.
I know nothing of Eichenwald's history, but I can't blame him for doing what he did here.