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What Tucker performs with his voice is more than mere sleight of hand. There's a real trick [1]
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Date: 2023-03-08
Tucker’s retelling of the January 6 overrun is of course a whitewash, a bamboozle, storytime for seditionists. He’s advancing the narrative that last year was pay-per-view only, one that his audience had to financially opt-in to in order to get Tucker’s take. Now—despite the fact that his network is under the magnifying glass regarding the Dominion lawsuit—Carlson has taken his new and improved story and offered it up free of charge to his wider audience. In so doing, he’s accomplishing two things:
Cement in the viewer’s mind what Carlson wants them to remember about that day. Most of the Fox audience has only fragmented information about that day, even when it was being broadcast live, precisely because of the distorted view that the network brought to the event while it was unfolding. Revisiting that day with this “new” footage equips Carlson with the tools to excavate the old memories of the footage that his audience might recall and refresh it with new angles and explanations that were not available to be constructed until just now. Memory is malleable. Redirect all of the viewer’s attention to the propaganda without, not within.
This is the epic misdirection that Tucker pulls off. Tucker details what propaganda is, but in the context of actively delivering propaganda.
Carlson [voiceover]: By controlling the images you are allowed to view from January 6, they controlled how the public understood that day. They could lie about what happened and you would never know the difference. Those lies had a purpose. They created a pretext….
In this trick, the audience is directed elsewhere about what constitutes propaganda; and by negative suggestion (that is, through this misdirection) they never connect what they’re viewing right then and there with what is being described. They’re basically being told not to apply the standard to what they’re consuming at that moment. Tucker’s narration, coming as it were disembodied—spectral and omnipresent—leads the audience to take his dictation as a reference point, never as an example.
To his viewers, Tucker is a dictionary voiceover. He is that reliable and authoritative as a source.
This technique is more deceptive than “regular” propaganda, because it purports to define the term while completely fulfilling the criteria of propaganda, convincing viewers that what propaganda is exists outside of itself while it is performing that very function.
This is the ultimate in chutzpah. Meanwhile, the audience, charged, is doubly wary, looking everywhere for propaganda except for what’s directly filling their eyes and ears. It’s a meta form of misdirection, a technique that renders Tucker Carlson himself nearly translucent.
I mean to delve more into the intricacies of Carlson’s directives to his audience. He gives several suggestions, delivered in the form of imperatives and other action verbs that encourage his viewers to follow his directions. His team’s interpretation of events, for example, overturn the viewers’ memory of that day. He means to overwrite their own recollections.
I have no doubt that Carlson has engineered more such moments in this brief reordering of events, which he will apparently air over the course of several nights. I plan to return to his remarks and treat them more fully. But here I wanted to showcase exactly how he is tugging his audience. He’s not strongarming them—it’s more like when a parent has a child on a leash lead and gently is tugging them toward themselves or at least keeping the child within a distinct radius. He’s steering them.
A parting thought: I have seen at least three hosts (influencers) who have spoken up about this story, and each has attempted to refute Tucker’s claims one by one. This will not work. It’s the equivalent of attempting to counter someone engaged in a Gish gallop. There are too many falsehoods to try to correct.
The target audience has already gotten Tucker’s version from start to finish—they have a full narrative. Coming in piecemeal to kick a leg out one at a time almost seems destined to fail because, to the target audience, it will look and feel petty. They will be able to reach back into the full narrative, pull out a facet that feels more solid to them, and they will wave that in the air as a rebuttal. They’re invested in defending what Tucker is telling them, because Tucker is absolving them.
We must find other ways—stronger and more direct—to defeat what Carlson and his ilk are doing.
[END]
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