During his April 9 show, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson raged at NBC senior business correspondent Stephanie Ruhle for purportedly claiming it was “a positive sign” that millions of people are unemployed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. There was just one problem: As noted virtually immediately by my colleague Parker Molloy, the MSNBC footage that Carlson aired took Ruhle dramatically out of context, removing her explicit calls for more and quicker aid to workers and her sympathy for grocery workers who have contracted and even died from COVID-19.
As Molloy noted (and has noted before), this is part of Carlson’s act. Carlson wants to portray himself as more concerned about workers than his targets are; in his view, they are elites concerned only with their own well-being.
The full context of Ruhle’s comments -- and what Carlson chose to cut -- reveals this deceptive segment as just another Fox News lie. Ruhle actually expressed more concern for the well-being of the workers than Carlson has, calling for more government action to help them during this unprecedented crisis. Ruhle earlier in the day interviewed Zenobia Shepherd, who railed at the lack of protections after her daughter Leilani Jordan, a grocery store worker with cerebral palsy, died from COVID-19.
