CNN’s Chris Cuomo bashed FOX News host Tucker Carlson for comments he made last week on the effect immigration has on the U.S. that has cost him more than a dozen advertisers. Carlson said that liberals believe the U.S. has a moral obligation to take in the world’s poor which in turn will make the nation “poorer and dirtier.” Cuomo called it “hateful speech” and that he felt it was important for his audience to see what someone’s trying to “pass off as news.”
“The FOX fear train ran into a familiar roadblock,” Cuomo opened the segment. “The same rancor that fuels their demonizing of migrants and drives their numbers also tends to turn off advertisers that turn ratings into revenue. More than a dozen companies have pulled their ads.”
The offending comment was made last Thursday on Tucker Carlson Tonight:
TUCKER CARLSON: Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided.
“I don’t know where his people come from, but dirtier? Is he really talking about human beings that way?” Cuomo asked. “I don’t know ordinarily play hateful speech on the show, but it’s important for people to see what someone’s trying to pass off as news.”
Cuomo, a primetime CNN host, also refused to call Carlson his “colleague”
“People have been trying to divide this country on the basis of the us and the them for a long time,” Cuomo said. “What Tucker Carlson does is not new, and you said he’s your colleague. I worked at FOX News. It was my first real job in this business. I worked for Roger Ailes.
“I don’t consider him my colleague. I think the Trump trio are in a different business than the one that I’m in. They have different tactics. They have different reasons for doing it, and they have different goals of what they’re trying to do so I don’t consider him a colleague,” Cuomo said.
“It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the right to say it, but so do advertisers have the right to respond to what he says. Same thing for us,” he added.
Cuomo said he is not looking for a fight but said about Carlson, “I guarantee you in person he’s not going to be that loud and proud, you know, puppy dog puss.”
“This is about TV and what he comes across as. The reason not to fight it is I don’t want to give it too much of an audience, although they already have a huge audience within FOX. But we’ve got to call it out. I don’t care what advertisers do… but the idea of saying that we are forced, they’re forcing us to take in these people, who’s ‘they’? Who’s us? That’s what we need to stop,” Cuomo demanded.
Don Lemon said he doesn’t like to criticize colleagues but called FOX News Channel the ‘CNN-MSNBC Criticism Channel’ that hates CNN because they report “real news” as opposed to “opinion journalists” on FNC.
DON LEMON, ‘CNN TONIGHT’ HOST: Here’s how I feel about it. We don’t usually like to criticize turn on FOX any night, it is the CNN-MSNBC Criticism Channel. They almost always lead with something that we’re doing that they hate, and they hate because we’re actually talking about real news and the Mueller investigation and what’s actually going on in the country.
So another reason I don’t like to do it is because people in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks because one day it could be you or me, because we sit here and we’re live. I’m live for two [hours] at least every single night, and sometimes you say things, and it comes out, and you didn’t realize you said it, or it comes out the wrong way, and you offend people. But here’s the difference, and I don’t think people should be boycotted for something that they do that’s a one-off, or occasionally you make a mistake and you say something wrong. But when it’s how you use your platform comprehensively, how you use it on an overall basis, on a general basis every single day.
I come at that. You come at that. And the people on this network come at that through truth, through journalism, and telling and telling people what is real and what is not.
Now, the folks who are there are opinion journalists. They don’t have to abide by those rules. For the most part, Tucker Carlson uses his platform to demonize immigrants almost on a nightly basis, to demonize this network almost on a nightly basis, to spread false information, misinformation, to spread the president’s lies, to cover the president’s back, to carry his water on a nightly basis.
So you be the judge of how you feel about what’s happening with him and his advertisers, that’s one thing.
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