New York Post Editorial Board Takes Shot at Vivek Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson
Hell hath no fury like a media empire scorned, apparently.
In a scathing Friday editorial taking aim at presidential candidate and conservative activist Vivek Ramaswamy, the New York Post’s board said his run had “devolved into a bid for social-media fame” in part because he wanted Tucker Carlson as a debate moderator.
Carlson, who was fired from his position at Fox News while still remaining under Fox News contract, has taken his show onto X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, getting a new “very online”
This reaction came after a Friday statement by Ramaswamy in which he offered, as an antidote to declining ratings for Republican debates, a debate on social media to juice interest.
“This January GOP debate should be held on X, not on cable TV, moderated by Tucker [Carlson], who might just ask questions that primary voters actually care about,” Ramaswamy told the Post.
“They say they want to reach younger voters and new audiences? Well that’s how you do it,” he added.
Now, whether or not this actually reaches a larger audience is anyone’s guess; short of an appearance by Donald Trump, who happens to be the frontrunner in this race and has avoided the scrums for second, I suspect nothing would get the ratings out of the gutter.
However, a debate on social media hosted by the most influential social media-only (for now) conservative there is a move made in good faith, particularly given that the 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur and activist is inarguably closer to the pulse of social media than any of the rest of the candidates.
But, no — to the Post’s editorial board, it was proof he was a farce and very dangerous to the Republicans at the same time. I wonder why.
“Sure, he claimed it would be a way to increase viewership — but you don’t get a larger audience by making something harder to watch,” the Post’s editorial board said. [Emphasis in the original.]
“His idea would shrink the audience — while increasing the proportion of views addicted to clickbait,” the editorial continued.
“That he suggests Tucker Carlson to host only doubles down on that gambit: Like Ramaswamy, Carlson used to raise important topics that much of the media didn’t want to touch — but these days he’s largely dedicated to pushing buttons hard for a select audience.”
Yes, Tucker “used to raise important topics that most of the media didn’t want to touch” — presumably, this period ended precisely when his on-air presence on Fox News did — but now he’s going way over the line on that nasty ol’ social media platform.
As for “the direction of Ramaswamy’s campaign,” the Post editorial board insisted “he increasingly relies on conspiracy theories and his most ‘unique’ ideas for his appeal.”
“The answer is not an online-only debate, Vivek,” the board concluded.
“It’s about getting serious about what the country needs and why you’re the candidate to do it. Stop trying to limit the audience and instead broaden it, recapturing some of the excitement that got you on the debate stage in the first place.”
Again, this isn’t an opinion piece with a byline. This is by the editorial board — i.e., demarcating what is, more or less, the official position of a publication.
If that publication is an integral part of a wider media empire, one can also glean that this is probably the opinion of that organization as a whole; the Post is arguably one of the three main components of News Corp’s empire, along with The Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
The last being, you know, the network that fired Carlson.
But, of course, that didn’t factor into any of this. Nothing to see here. Vivek’s campaign is officially a joke. Get the message, people.
Look, one doesn’t expect a newspaper under Rupert Murdoch’s control to officially jump for joy that Ramaswamy name-checked Carlson as a possible debate host, but for that paper’s editorial board to make a bad-faith assumption that Vivek has gone into conspiracy-theory la-la land in part because of that name-check is profoundly inappropriate.
If it isn’t a nakedly cynical move to tear into a former employee and anyone who supports him, it certainly looks like it — and isn’t something a paper that professes to be somewhat fair to the right should be doing.
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