On Monday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson called out The New York Times for cheering how the French media ignored leaked emails from French presidential contender Emmanuel Macron. On Tuesday, the Times published a Rachel Donadio article headlined "Why a Hacking Attack Failed to Sway the French Vote for President."
Donadio (or her Times editors) felt compelled to offer joy and relief that France has no infernal Fox News to somehow undermine democracy (that is, Democrats):
The contrast with the United States presidential campaign was sharp: Hacking of Hillary Clinton that was traced to Russia may have played a role in her defeat by Donald J. Trump, but news of the hacking in France was met with silence, disdain and scorn.
The contrast may have been amplified further by the absence of a French equivalent to the thriving tabloid culture in Britain or the robust right-wing broadcast media in the United States, where the Clinton hacking attack generated enormous negative coverage.
“We don’t have a Fox News in France,” said Johan Hufnagel, managing editor of the leftist daily Libération. “There’s no broadcaster with a wide audience and personalities who build this up and try to use it for their own agendas.”
And Donadio's article ended with an explicit reference to America being infested with O'Reilly, Hannity and so on:
The National Front does not have the equivalent of a Bill O'Reilly or a Sean Hannity, the right-wing commentators who helped shore up Mr. Trump's presidential bid. While French commentators such as Éric Zemmour, a regular on radio and television who has a column in Le Figaro, have fed into a sense of decline and insecurity that the National Front tried to capitalize on politically, neither he nor other so-called neo-reactionary commentators endorsed the far-right party.
In the United States, reaction to the Macron leaks was more animated, and Hillary Clinton took to Twitter to comment. ''Victory for Macron, for France, the EU, & the world. Defeat to those interfering w/democracy. (But the media says I can't talk about that).''
The Times basically endorsed the Hillary Clinton line that American media coverage of Wikileaks information was a plot by dreaded foreigners to "interfere with democracy."
Carlson lamented how the Times implied "that America could benefit from a similar arrangement here...So, let's see. The French government bullied news outlets to withhold potentially relevant information from French voters just days before an election. The country lacks diverse media viewpoints and America's most prestigious news outlet is applauding all of this? The world has gone crazy."
He concluded: "You know, 50 years ago [well, in 1971], The New York Times sued the federal government for the right to publish leaked military papers that were classified. The Pentagon Papers, and they won that case. Today, its reporters love the power of censorship to defeat politicians they don't like. We have fallen a long way and we're going still.
