Fox News trying to memorywash Tucker Carlson

Fox News Channel is taking extraordinary measures to avoid mentioning Tucker Carlson by name or face on its programs. But when they do that, they earn the enmity of their viewers and conservatives everywhere, new polls suggest.

How Fox News is trying to move past Carlson

Jack Gist, writing in The Western Journal, gave details Sunday afternoon. He reported that Fox News recently refused to run a political ad in which any stock or other footage of Tucker Carlson appears in it, even for a few seconds.

Gist quoted this article in Mediaite for that story. Eric Bolling, who also was once at Fox and is now at Newsmax, reported on this Friday evening. The SOS America Pac put together this ad supporting Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’ campaign for President.

This original form shows scenes of graphic street violence, including the firing of a police car, and the arrest of formerly active-duty Marine Daniel Penny, the “New York City Subway Hero.” It also shows some footage from Tucker Carlson’s old 8:00 p.m. show on Fox News.

Fox News refused to run it, unless the producers excised from it all Tucker Carlson footage, and the street violence. In particular they had to remove any depiction of “guns or shootings.”

Eric Bolling interviewed Chapin Fay of SOS America, who described the edits Fox ordered the PAC to make. Then he interviewed Chadwick Moore, a biographer of Tucker Carlson. In the process, Bolling actually said Fox has done this sort of thing before. Nevertheless they shocked Bolling by doing it to Tucker Carlson, and openly giving such peremptory orders to an ad producer.

Moore, for his part, was apoplectic. “Stalinesque!” he called it.

An older tradition

Actually Fox News seems to be following a far older, even ancient, tradition, even thousands of years old. In ancient Egypt, new Pharaohs, upon taking over from controversial predecessors, would “memorywash” them. They would literally order the stonecutters to chisel out all references to the dead Pharaoh and his works that they could find. Egyptologists have discovered untold pylons with effaced bas-relief faces. Joyce Tyldesley, in Hatchepsut: the Female Pharaoh, documented Thutmose III’s treatment of his stepmother Hatchepsut’s memory after her death. That any documents of her reign remain at all, are because Pharaoh Amenhotep II (Thutmose’ successor) put a stop to the practice, or because some of the documents exist as tomb frescoes or hieroglyphs that Thutmose’ “memorywashers” could not reach.

Precisely that treatment seems to be going on at Fox. And it has cost them dearly in reputation. WorldNetDaily republished Jack Gist’s story, per their content-sharing program. As part of that, they ran an admittedly unscientific poll with this question:

Is Fox News now an enemy of the American people?

The results are as devastating as they are instructive. WorldNetDaily seldom announces the results of such polls, but they did this time. Ninety-eight percent voted yes! Worse than the votes were the comments that accompanied the story. Most of those comments accused Fox of becoming the very thing they claimed to decry. But some observed that Fox News has always deleted conservative comments – and now have simply disabled comments.

Where is Tucker now?

Tucker Carlson, of course, has long since decamped to Twitter. He publishes two episodes a week, one each on Tuesday and Thursday. Fox sent him a cease-and-desist letter, but Tucker seems to be ignoring it.

In the meantime, Fox has revamped its weekday prime-time line-up. Jesse Watters will replace Tucker Carlson in the coveted 8:00 p.m. slot, according to The Daily Caller. Laura Ingraham will move to 7:00 p.m., Sean Hannity will stay at 9:00 p.m., and Greg Gutfeld will move to 10:00 p.m. Trace Gallagher’s “Fox News @ Night” program will run at 11:00 p.m. Todd Starnes carried Fox News’ full statement.