On Fox News, Tucker Carlson and Dave Portnoy launch attacks on Business Insider reporter
Published
Citation From the November 8, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Dave Portnoy is the founder, of course, of Barstool Sports. He's a cultural icon. Portnoy is not especially political, he seems a lot more interested in stock tips than election polling, but he's unapologetically American, always has bene. He thinks you ought to be allowed to say what you really think in the country even if NBC News doesn't like it. So that attitude and his success as a publisher has made Portnoy a massive threat to legacy media organizations. They truly hate him.
So, last week, they decided to destroy his life. A sleazy little blog called Business Insider dispatched a robot reporter to snoop around in Portnoy's sex life. They did not find anything illegal or even especially surprising, but they tried their best to humiliate him. Now they're harassing his advertisers.
The question is, can this Business Insider, whoever that is, succeed in killing Dave Portnoy? And that's a question that anyone who is interested in free speech should probably care about. To answer it, we've invited Dave Portnoy himself to join us tonight and we're grateful that he has. Thank you for coming on. I guess the rules are, they do not like your posture, the cut of your jib your attitude. You do not take orders, so they send some little robot to snoop around in your personal life, don't find anything illegal, but print all this stuff anonymously about your sex life and then try to destroy you? These are the rules now?
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DAVE PORTNOY: It's weird because I'm being treated as though I'm a politician, and politics is the dirtiest game ever. I will say Penn, which is a -- Penn National, which is involved with Barstool, there's a lot of Penn stock, Penn stock had their earnings -- the day this article dropped, the day this article dropped -- there's 365 days in a year, it dropped the same day, the day before there was wild shorting. Basically, people betting against Penn. You can bet on a stock, against it. For some reason, tons of people bet against it in the day before it dropped. As you mentioned, Henry Blodget was convicted for SEC fraud, he can never trade stocks the rest of his life, he stole working people's money. That's the CEO of the company that wrote this hit piece.