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Tucker Carlson targets Dr. Fauci

This is so gross. Carlson went through Fauci’s emails (released under the FOIA) which show nothing amiss — but leave it to Tucker to dazzle his addled audience with a load of bullshit anyway. The WaPo’s Philip Bump does a detailed fact check on Carlson’s bogus claims and concludes:

We’ve seen this pattern over and over in recent years: Big caches of documents are released and motivated parties cherry-pick questionable elements and present them as somehow definitive. We saw it with the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2015 and 2016. We saw it with the material stolen by Russian hackers in 2016 and released by WikiLeaks. We saw it with the text messages between two FBI officials released in 2017.

That’s perhaps the best example, in fact. One of those messages, from former FBI agent Peter Strzok, mentioned an “insurance policy” — a phrase that has been used countless times to suggest an effort to blackmail Trump, though the actual reason for its use was entirely different. But it was lifted out of the pile, framed in a particular way and it stuck, despite a more obviously accurate alternative later emerging.

That’s the risk with Carlson’s attacks on Fauci. It’s not just that Carlson is leapfrogging over the evidence. It’s that he’s helping to establish a framing of this material that is far more compelling than it is well founded. Carlson’s presentation of Fauci as a liar and a criminal is planted in thin soil, but it will have an entire community working to nurture it. That’s the recent pattern, too: using isolated, decontextualized bits of material to support other such material, building out an accusatory house of cards.

Last year, Fox News attorneys deflected slander allegations against Carlson by arguing that his show was obviously an exercise in “ ‘exaggeration’ and ‘nonliteral commentary’ ” that viewers should understand is often not “stating actual facts.” They don’t.

Get ready to hear a slew of Trump cult man-on-the-street interviews spewing a bunch of incomprehensible gobbledygook about Fauci and Wuhan. It’s tragic.

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