Tucker Carlson crushes journalist who defends Buzzfeed's "fake news" propaganda

Alex Christoforou
The Duran
Fri, 13 Jan 2017 12:55 UTC

Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson gets in a heated debate with Fortune Senior Writer Mathew Ingram, a man who is actually defending Buzzfeed.

Tucker Carlson takes on Fortune Senior Writer Mathew Ingram over the fictitious allegations published about President-elect Trump in Buzzfeed, and later reported by CNN.

Fortune senior writer Mathew Ingram argues that BuzzFeed was right to publish the dossier with unverified allegations against President-elect Donald Trump.

Ingram made these arguments in a post for Fortune:

The allegations have potentially significant implications, including the suggestion that the Russian government is not only trying to pressure Donald Trump but has succeeded in cutting deals with him.

Even if they are currently unverified, that makes publishing the full documents justifiable on journalistic grounds. Doing so may even make it easier to verify the claims made in them, since it is likely to flush sources of all kinds out of the woodwork. But even if it didn't, there is a solid argument to be made that BuzzFeed did the right thing in publishing them.

The case against publishing amounts to arguing that journalists are the only ones who are qualified to see such allegations, and that only a handful of media organizations are entitled to make the decision about what is credible and what isn't. Like it or not, that isn't how journalism works any more...

Finding the truth is no longer something that journalists get to do inside newsrooms, armed with information that is distributed only to them. It is something everyone gets to do. That may sound like total chaos, and it clearly has negative as well as positive aspects—as Donald Trump himself has shown us time and time again. But it is the reality of media today, so we had better start figuring out how to do it properly.

Carlson argued that journalists should not be publishing information that is obviously not true.

Carlson asked Ingram...

"Isn't it irresponsible to pass on something you can't verify?"

Ingram replied by saying that reports about Hillary Clinton emails weren't 100 percent verified...except that those emails were verified by Wikileaks which has a 10 year perfect record.

Carlson asked Ingram if he would publish the documents as Buzzfeed did...Ingram said "YES".

Carlson quickly crushed Ingram..."Then you have low standards, I'm sorry."

Comment: Further reading: Precious Snowflakes Cheer as 'Deep State Overlords' Declare War on Trump

One can certainly object to Buzzfeed's decision and, as the New York Times notes this morning, many journalists are doing so. It's almost impossible to imagine a scenario where it's justifiable for a news outlet to publish a totally anonymous, unverified, unvetted document filled with scurrilous and inflammatory allegations about which its own editor-in-chief says there "is serious reason to doubt the allegations," on the ground that they want to leave it to the public to decide whether to believe it.

But even if one believes there is no such case where that is justified, yesterday's circumstances presented the most compelling scenario possible for doing this. Once CNN strongly hinted at these allegations, it left it to the public imagination to conjure up the dirt Russia allegedly had to blackmail and control Trump. By publishing these accusations, BuzzFeed ended that speculation. More importantly, it allowed everyone to see how dubious this document is, one the CIA and CNN had elevated into some sort of grave national security threat.