The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

TUCKER Carlson is 53 years old. Born in San Francisco and the graduate of an exclusive prep school in Rhode Island (where he met and later married the headmaster’s daughter) and an exclusive private college in Connecticut, Carlson has a beautiful family, a fat bank account and a lovely house in the Washington, DC, area.

For the past seven years, he has starred in a ratings-dominant prime-time show on the Fox News network.

This morning, he is at the centre of American political life. It’s fair to wonder if there is a bigger story today in the US than Tucker Carlson. There are two principal reasons for this.

First, as more information from within the inner councils of Fox News leaks out into the public arena every day in connection with the huge libel suit filed against the network by voting machine manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems, Carlson’s apparently unedited personal views about former president Donald Trump have been highlighted.

Two years ago, just before the January 6, 2021 assault on the US capitol by Trump supporters, Carlson texted the following to a friend: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately. ... I can’t handle much more of this.”

Carlson was apparently referring to Trump’s insistence that he had actually won the 2020 presidential election – an election that it was abundantly clear two months afterward that he had in fact lost decisively.

In a different text message, Carlson said “we’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for (Trump’s four years as president), because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

Meantime, as has been exhaustively reported, Carlson and his Fox News colleagues were reporting virtually every night on “doubts, stories I’ve heard, etc, etc” about tales of election corruption in almost every corner of the US where Trump lost, especially in close swing states where Joe Biden’s margin of victory was slender.

Most Americans by now likely accept the truth of the notion that Fox News was putting out this blather in a conscious effort to prop up its ratings (and healthy advertising revenue) in the face of heavy criticism by Trump of Fox’s heresy in actually having correctly called Arizona first for Biden on Election Night. Imagine that … actually behaving like a responsible news organisation. Shame on Fox News.

It seems that Fox’s loyal viewers began switching to Newsmax and One America News to hear what they wanted to hear about Trump’s election results, perhaps knowing the truth of the matter but unaccepting of it.

If Fox had any doubts about whether or not Trump viewed them as simply a tame, dependent (and free) forum for his bombastic propaganda and campaign, those doubts must have been dispelled by his response to their skillful and honourable call of the Arizona race.

But if he was using Fox, they were using Trump too. Because this man has been, and continues to be, the dazzling sun that eclipses much of the rest of American political life and discourse.

By the way, liberals and Democratic politicians are always available for CNN, MSNBC and other sympathetic outlets. And while these networks cloak themselves in the comforting mantle of truth tellers, it’s also true that they can and do gloat over any misfortune that befalls Trump, his family, his sycophantic allies like Roger Stone, and Fox News. If you were watching evening cable news broadcasts this week, there was plenty of supporting evidence for this.

The second reason for Carlson’s unprecedented role in the spotlight today is his manipulation in a recent TV special report of January 6 riot film footage made exclusively available to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in what reportedly might have been a bargain struck with holdout House Republican hardliners during the excruciating process by which he was chosen as Speaker.

The New York Times opined that in doing so, McCarthy “effectively outsourced the rewriting the history of the riot to the right wing’s favorite news commentator, who has circulated conspiracy theories about the attack”.

While many House Republicans touted Carlson’s reporting, which essentially attempts to dilute the rancid distaste left behind in the wake of the brazen January 6 assault, some GOP Senate leaders pushed back.

Minority leader Mitch McConnell said “clearly the chief of the Capitol Police, in my view, correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6. It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks”.

That official, Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, said of Carlson’s broadcast: “Last night, an opinion programme aired commentary that was filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6 attack. The programme conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of 41,000 of hours of video. The commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence that happened before or during these moments (in the video record).”

Utah senator Mitt Romney weighed in. “The American people saw what happened on January 6, they’ve seen the people that got injured, they saw the damage to the building,” Romney told reporters. “You can’t hide the truth by selectively picking a few minutes out of tapes and saying this is what went on. It’s dangerous and disgusting.”

While McConnell and Romney have not hidden their distaste for Trump personally, they deserve some praise because both men will face re-election next year, when their antipathy toward Trump could be politically dangerous for them.

Carlson may soon empathise.

WHY DO WE ‘SPRING FORWARD’, AND DOES IT STILL MAKE SENSE?

ON Saturday night/Sunday morning, we will again “spring forward” and potentially lose an hour of sleep. The semi-annual ritual of converting our clocks and watches (but not cell phones) to Daylight Savings Time will be repeated anew. In Washington and maybe in Nassau there may again be expressions of mild outrage from politicians and pundits. But here we are. Again.

How did we get to this point? It is widely believed in the United States that Daylight Savings Time was first implemented for the benefit of farmers. Actually, farmers have been one of the most prominent groups pushing back against DST since it was first introduced. Wikipedia tells us that the factors that most significantly influence farming schedules are ultimately dictated by the sun, so the change DST introduces unnecessary challenges to routines such as milking dairy cows.

Several sources attribute the origin of the idea of DST to American founding father Benjamin Franklin, still the greatest hero claimed by the state of Pennsylvania and a renowned “renaissance man” whose creativity and imagination rivalled that of Thomas Jefferson.

In a tongue-in-cheek letter to the editor of The Journal of Paris written in 1784, Franklin suggested that waking up earlier in the summer would save on candle usage; and he figured out that this would create considerable savings for everyone. Over a century later in 1895, a New Zealand entomologist and astronomer named George Hudson supposedly proposed the idea of changing clocks by two hours every spring. In 1907, an Englishman named William Willett promoted the idea as a way to save energy.

Decades later, Sir Winston Churchill championed DST. He said “the opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness among the millions of people who live in (Britain).”

Retail trade, sports, and tourism sectors in most parts of the world have historically favoured DST, while bars, restaurants and theaters have generally opposed it. This makes sense. More daylight means more practice, shopping and sightseeing time. Shortening the evening hours hurts evening entertainment venues.

DST was apparently first adopted by North America in 1908 in the northwestern Ontario city of Port Arthur, located next to Thunder Bay near the border with Minnesota on Lake Superior.

During the World War in 1916, military planners in Berlin and Vienna saw tactical and logistical benefits to DST (it saved coal and other fuels) and implemented it in the German and Austro- Hungarian empires. Most nations in northern and western Europe followed suit, including France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Britain converted three weeks later, on May 21, 1916.

The US adopted DST in 1918 and has basically maintained it since.