Tucker Carlson Flat-Out Lied to His Audience By Cutting Out Most Unhinged Moments From Kanye Interview

Tucker Carlson crossed several ethical lines and effectively lied to his audience in presenting his interview with Kanye West, which aired across two nights on Fox News last week.

The top-rated Fox News host and mercurial rapper, producer, and fashion impresario enjoyed a mutually beneficial round of media attention — which included relentless post-game coverage on Fox News — following their extensive sit-down.

West, or Ye as he prefers to be called now, sat with Carlson after making headlines at a Paris fashion show where he proudly wore a “White Lives Matter” shirt. The ensuing outrage aligned well with Carlson’s quest to prove White people are under attack, so Carlson invited West on his show to further that mission.

After all, Fox News hosts cannot resist a celebrity who voices even vaguely conservative beliefs.

But Carlson did not report the true story in his interview. We shouldn’t have expected him to. He may have once been an impressive reporter, but he abandoned that field a long time ago. He’s a political advocate who argues on behalf of one partisan agenda. His commitment is not to facts or truth but to creating a narrative regardless of truth or facts.

The West incident, however, went way over the line.

You see, West’s struggles with mental health have long been documented. He has spoken frequently about his bipolar disorder. Anyone who has had experience with a narcissistic or bipolar personality could recognize he is going through a manic episode.

Carlson addressed that assessment head-on. In presenting the roughly 60 minutes of interview footage over two nights, he repeatedly insisted West is not at all the unhinged individual he gets dismissed as. Instead, he made sure his viewers understood that in his purview, West appeared completely sane.

More than sane, Carlson argued West was convincing in his beliefs.

“Is West crazy?” Carlson asked at the top of the first interview. “You can judge for yourself as you watch what we are about to show you. He has his own ideas… But crazy? That was not our conclusion.”

“Not crazy,” Carlson concluded after the interview. “Worth listening to, even if you disagree with him.”

The interview portions that aired on Fox News included a lot of wild and… non-traditional assertions made by Kanye. But then we learned that viewers didn’t get the full picture of the Tucker Carlson-Kanye West sit-down.

Vice was provided leaked outtakes from the interview, which they published on Monday. These outtakes reveal flatly anti-Semitic and conspiratorial views. They also include comments that come across as, I dare say, paranoid, if not schizophrenic in nature.

The moments Vice obtained show West to be far more unhinged than the man who appeared across two nights on Fox News.

Per Vice:

At another point, when complaining that his children are going to a school that celebrates Kwanzaa, Ye added, “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering.” (The belief that Jews control the financial system is one of the oldest and most deeply-rooted antisemitic claims. It’s unclear if that’s what he meant by “financial engineering,” a term generally associated with the creation of exotic financial instruments.)

In one more aside, Ye told Carlson that he was going to be “the first Latino president.” That statement was aired, but it was followed by something that wasn’t. “I just, I trust Latinos when I, you know, when I work with them,” he told Carlson. “I trust them more than—” he paused. “I’ll be safe, certain other businessmen, you know.” (Carlson did not ask which businessmen those might be.)

Those comments were edited out from Carlson’s final product, allowing him to present a far more reasonable West.

Of course, over the weekend West blew up Carlson’s heavily edited version of him. He spewed anti-Semitic comments on Instagram and Twitter, earning him suspensions from both platforms.

As Aidan McLaughlin noted yesterday, “Carlson did not address those comments — which included West declaring war on Jewish people — on his show Monday night, though he continued to celebrate the Trump-supporting rapper.”

In the parts of the interview that were edited out, West also claimed his long-time creative director Virgil Abloh, who died of cancer last year, was “killed” by his employer Louis Vuitton. He suggested that “fake children” had been placed in his house to manipulate his children. He also told Carlson about his desire to create “kinetic energy communities” built with “free energy,” a technology that … isn’t a real thing.

Not only was this cut out of the interview that aired, but the balance of the interview was presented as evidence of West’s sanity.

Again, McLaughlin summed up the journalistic questions here quite succinctly:

All of those were seemingly scrubbed from the Carlson interview. West, who has spoken at length about his mental health and bipolar disorder, was given a large platform to speak about his views on a news network. The extreme and paranoid conspiracy theories were apparently edited out, while the views that Carlson approved of were kept in, and Carlson presented his guest as an eminently reasonable thinker across two nights on Fox.

To recap: Carlson interviewed someone who has spoken publicly about their mental health issues. He sat and listened to that person spew anti-Semitic comments. He edited those comments and aired the parts of the interview he liked, and concluded West is someone “worth listening to.”

Cable news interviews are edited for time and clarity all the time. It’s the nature of the business of which I myself have practiced in a previous time producing television.  But to intentionally remove evidence of instability while promoting the balance of the interview as evidence of calm and reasonable points of view? That’s crossing a significant line, even if you don’t care to abide by acceptable journalistic standards.

The larger issue is a trickier, if not more damning one. Kanye West does not appear to be in a healthy frame of mind, and anyone with an ounce of empathy and experience with the challenges of the human condition can readily see that. Carlson appeared to care less about West’s mental health than scoring some political points and advancing a narrative. A narrative that gets him so many viewers.

I’ve said it before regarding Tucker Carlson’s programming, and it’s germane here also: high ratings do not make this right. It’s time that executives at Fox News held him to account for this, but we all know that will likely never happen at a media corporation that values profits over any principle.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.