President Joe Biden gave a speech during Tucker Carlson’s time slot on Thursday night, and Fox News tried something new, and strange: having a live feed of Tucker’s face throughout, so viewers could enjoy watching him stare blankly into the camera while listening to the president.
The “Live Tucker Reaction” inlay may have been improvised on the fly — the box initially appeared a couple minutes into the speech, and then disappeared after about 30 seconds. A couple minutes after that it came back, and stayed up for seven minutes before disappearing again. It came and went two more times before the speech ended.
During the first 30-second chunk, Tucker barely moved, and certainly didn’t express any emotional response. And that was pretty much how it went the whole time. For the most part, he sat there stoned-faced — the same face he makes when he’s listening to a guest speak at length.
The first of the few times Tucker had a visual response to something Biden said, it was during the part of his speech that discussed something that Tucker might want to take to heart.
“Too often we’ve turned against one another. A mask, the easiest thing to do to save lives — sometimes it divides us. States pitted against one another instead of working with each other,” Biden said.
“Vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans who’ve been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated. At this very moment, so many of them — our fellow Americans — they’re on the front lines of this pandemic trying to save lives. And still — still! — they’re forced to live in fear for their lives just walking down streets in America. It’s wrong, it’s un-American, and it must stop.”
Right after Biden said that it’s wrong to be racist against Asian Americans, we got one of Tucker’s most obvious reactions of the speech: he raised his eyebrows at that moment.
You can see that eyebrow-raising portion of the speech with the Tucker reaction cam in the video up at the top of this article.
A reminder that Fox News argued in court last year that Tucker Carlson should not to be treated like a credible news person.