Fox News’ Tucker Carlson blasted MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski for revealing details of an off-camera conversation with White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.
“Critics in the media often say that President Trump is diminishing the American presidency and at times there is some truth in that,” Carlson said on his show Monday night. “But it’s also true that in covering Trump the way that they have, many journalists have degraded and humiliated themselves.”
Carlson then played video of “an anchor from another network” doing just that, and the video was Monday’s newsmaking comments by Brzezinski about Conway, when she revealed details of an off-camera conversation.
On Monday’s “Morning Joe,” Brzezinski said of Conway, “This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and would shill for Trump in extensive fashion and then she would get off the air… the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off and she would say, ‘Bleeeech, I need to take a shower,’ because she disliked her candidate so much.”
Carlson said, “Now, I have no idea if Kellyanne Conway actually said anything like that. I do know that TV anchors almost never reveal what their guests have said off camera for good reason,” said the host, who has spent the bulk of his career as a political commentator on TV rather than as a journalist.
“People come to TV studios so they can speak on TV,” Carlson said. “They do not come with the expectation that their private conversations will wind up broadcast to the country.”
The “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host said that “even in media” there is a zone of privacy, which he felt Brzezinski violated. He did not explain why he felt comments made to a journalist, even off-camera, should be considered private.
“In more than 20 years of working on TV, I have never seen that happen,” he said.
“Many journalists believe it’s literally impossible to be unfair to Donald Trump or the people who work for him. Extremism in the pursuit of Trump is no vice. That’s the view in newsrooms and you hear it in conversations all around Washington, a city that voted 91 percent for Hillary Clinton last fall,” Carlson said. “They’ve succumbed to Trump hatred that is so intense, it has destroyed their judgment and in some cases affected their character.”
Check out the video above.