Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced on Tuesday that a new version of his show will soon be viewable exclusively on Twitter.
“You often hear people say the news is full of lies, but most of the time that’s not exactly right. Much of what you see on television or read in the New York Times is in fact true in the literal sense. It could pass one of the media’s own ‘fact checks.’ Lawyers would be willing to sign off on it. In fact, they may have. But that doesn’t make it true. It’s not true. At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie. A lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind,” Carlson said in a new video posted on Twitter.
“Facts have been withheld on purpose. Along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated,” he continued. “How does that work? Let’s see. If I tell you that a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery, that is not, strictly speaking, a lie. He may have been framed. At this point there has been no trial, so no one can really say. But if I don’t mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for the same crime six times before, am I really informing you? No, I’m not. I’m misleading you. And that’s what the news media are doing in every story that matters, every day of the week, every week of the year.”
Carlson hinted that his efforts to “tell the fullest truth” led to his firing from Fox News.
“You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true,” Carlson argued. “Speech is the fundamental prerequisite for democracy. That’s why it’s inshrined in the first of our constitutional amendments.”
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The popular conservative then praised Twitter as one of the only free speech platforms left in the world, but warned that it is dominated by news media which he described as “thinly disguised propaganda outlets.”
“Starting soon, we’ll be bringing a new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six and a half years to Twitter,” Carlson said. “We’ll bring some other things, too, which we’ll tell you about. But for now we’re just grateful to be here. Free speech is the main right that you have. Without it, you have no others. See you soon.”
This was a breaking news story. The details were periodically updated as more information became available.
