Tucker shows talented Olberman and Stewart and even O'Reilly are

Armstead

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Thu Jul-13-06 08:51 AM
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Tucker shows talented Olberman and Stewart and even O'Reilly are

Edited on Thu Jul-13-06 09:10 AM by Armstead

Before you jump on me about including O'Reilly, please hear me out.

I'd rarely seen Tucker Carlson in his later nite time slot. But now that he's on earlier, I've been watching occasionally as an alternative to Lou Dobbs latest rants about illegal immigration.

Tucker is obviously trying to be a combination of Keith Olberman, the Daily Show and Bill O'Reilly. in other words, a conservative version of all those shows. Snarky, wise-assed, edgy, stirring up fights with his guests, and trying to start fueds with his co-horts in the media and supposedly being humorous while substantial.

But by all those standards, he flunks. He has no sense of humor a la KO and Stweart. He also lacks the heft and indignation of O'Reilly. Anyone who can make O'Reilly look good is at the bottom of the barrel.

His show comes across as a public-access version of Countdown...Or Wayne's World imitating Bill O'Reilly.

For example, he interviewed Mike Papantonio of the Show Ring of Fire. To his credit, Carlson agreed with Mike that the Iraq War was a disaster and that Bush's foreign policy is a trainwreck....But could he actually allow a liberal guest to go unchallenged? Noooooooooo. Carlson had to knit-pick and reobotically repeat the old "Bush bashing" and "You liberals always blame America" mantras.....So the interview could have been scripted by Tom Tomorrow. "Well Mike I agree with you that the iraq War was wrong, and that our current foreign policy is a failure. But why are you liberals always Bashing Bush?"

He is obviously trying to stir the media pot, by taking on his cable competitors and making cogent satiric obversations about the foibles of cable news. Not a bad idea, but his "media criticisms" totally miss the mark. He singled out Anderson Cooper for scorn for pretending to be a reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, but undercutting that by interviewing Dave Chappel. .....Okay maybe there's a point there, but Tucker totally undermined his own criticism with a whopper of a mistake. "Anderson, if you want to be Edward R. Murrow, then you can't also do celebrity fluff like interviewing Dave Chappel.".......One slight problem. Edward R. Murrow also did a weekly show of fluffy interviews with celebrities.

It's so weak that the seams show. It's like someone said "Well we've gotten a lot of mileage out of the fued between KO ands O'reilly, so Tucker has to try to start feuds too."....So the phoniess of it becomes glaringly obvious.

There is nothing like a bad version of something to make you realize how hard it is to make a good version of something. Watching Tucker makes you realize how sharp and smart KO is. It makes you realize how truly clever Stewart and his crew are.....It even makes you realize that as awaful as he is, O'Reilly at least has a certain weight and a genuine sense of outrage when compared to Tucker.

It almost makes one long for a return of the Abrams Report or Rita Cosby. At least they were so bad they had a negative form of entertainment value.