CNN Analyst, Lib Writer Uses Death of Fox News Reporter to Make Despicable Point
You may not agree with Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the conflict in Ukraine. I certainly don’t. I don’t think it’s merely a “border dispute” or that there’s “nothing we could possibly gain” from confronting Russia.
However, I’m not going to make the death of a Fox News cameraman in Ukraine about Tucker’s positions on the conflict or to accuse him of being a “pro-Putin propagandist.” That’s where CNN analyst and New Yorker writer Susan Glasser and I — as well as the vast majority of the Carlson-disagreeing world, I would suspect — differ.
In a spectacular display of tone-deafness, Glasser took to Twitter shortly after the death of Pierre Zakrzewski, a veteran cameraman with Fox News who was killed outside of Kyiv on Tuesday, to bash the network that employed him for employing Carlson. Only after that did she say she was “grateful for the heroic work” Zakrzewski did; the order in which the tweets came gave all the context one needed to determine what was really important to her.
And yet, she’ll almost certainly face no repercussions. As of Wednesday morning, she hasn’t even bothered to delete the tweet. If it weren’t for double standards, the left would have no standards at all — a sad fact which we’ve chronicled all too often here at The Western Journal. (We’ll keep on documenting it, too — and you can help us point out the double standard by subscribing.)
According to Fox News, Zakrzewski died when the vehicle he was traveling in was hit by incoming fire in Horenka, a suburb of Ukraine.
“Pierre was a war zone photographer who covered nearly every international story for FOX News from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria during his long tenure with us,” Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott said in a statement. “His passion and talent as a journalist were unmatched. Based in London, Pierre had been working in Ukraine since February.”
“His talents were vast and there wasn’t a role that he didn’t jump in to help with in the field — from photographer to engineer to editor to producer — and he did it all under immense pressure with tremendous skill,” Scott continued. “He was profoundly committed to telling the story and his bravery, professionalism and work ethic were renowned among journalists at every media outlet. He was wildly popular – everyone in the media industry who has covered a foreign story knew and respected Pierre.”
So, what’s the first thing Susan Glasser talked about in her Tuesday tweet?
What a tragedy. A cameraman died covering the war for a TV network that airs a pro-Putin propagandist as its top-rated primetime host. https://t.co/zKHXRciMYu
— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) March 15, 2022
“What a tragedy. A cameraman died covering the war for a TV network that airs a pro-Putin propagandist as its top-rated primetime host,” she said, retweeting Fox News’ John Roberts.
Then, five minutes later: “So grateful for the heroic work that Pierre and all the journalists, Ukrainian and foreign, have been doing risking their lives to show us the horror of this war. Makes the years of lies and propaganda so much harder to take—there are truly deadly consequences.
So grateful for the heroic work that Pierre and all the journalists, Ukrainian and foreign, have been doing risking their lives to show us the horror of this war. Makes the years of lies and propaganda so much harder to take—there are truly deadly consequences.
— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) March 15, 2022
Yeah, thoughts and prayers for his family and all that. But getting back to Tucker …
In case you don’t know what Glasser is referring to, Carlson has been skeptical of U.S. measures aimed at Russia because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, leading to accusations he’s a Putinist stooge.
Not that Carlson is apologetic.
“Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years?” Carlson said on a February show, according to The Hill.
Before the war started, his position was similar: “There is nothing we could possibly gain from a military confrontation with Vladimir Putin and there is very much we could lose, including of course many thousands of American lives, but that doesn’t mean Joe Biden won’t do it,” he said on Dec. 7, according to a Fox News transcript.
If you’re looking for someone to cosign those thoughts, look elsewhere, because I don’t share them. That said, Carlson has long been an isolationist in these matters, so this isn’t some kind of radical departure — and Ukraine is virtually the only story at the moment. If people are tuning into his broadcast, perhaps it isn’t to be brainwashed with Kremlin propaganda so much as it is that he’s one of the few dissenting voices on TV.
That said, we’re well beyond the point where one could hope the left would endorse (or, heck, tolerate) a diverse range of opinions on the air: Anchors and pundits have the freedom to speak the opinions of the great unthinking Democrat blob, else they’re racist/sexist/xenophobic/Kremlin apologists/authoritarian/etc.
If Glasser wants to indulge in this kind of rhetoric, it’s not particularly surprising. It’s well outside the range of normal human response, however, to use Zakrzewski’s death as a springboard to do it.
Needless to say, Twitter reacted badly:
What a terribly sad and pathetic person you are.
— Joe Matthews (@jmatthews1065) March 15, 2022
Did you tweet that from your nice digs in D.C. or Martha’s Vineyard?
You’re terrible.
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 15, 2022
Susan, delete this.
— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) March 15, 2022
There are two kinds of people who use Twitter when someone dies; those who mourn a tragic death and those who use that death as an opportunity to bash the victim and their other political opponents.
We need much more of the former and far fewer of the latter.
— Joel M. Petlin (@Joelmpetlin) March 15, 2022
Time and place. The death of a wartime cameraman is not the time and place for this tweet.
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) March 15, 2022
When even Joe Walsh — a one-term GOP congressman and conservative radio host-turned-ardent NeverTrumper, 2020 Republican presidential primary challenger and semi-professional Tucker Carlson loather — thinks you’ve gone too far, you’ve gone too far.
Glasser will no doubt offer alternative facts for this tweet sometime on Wednesday. We all didn’t understand that she was really trying to respect Zakrzewski by pointing out his network is sullying his name by employing Tucker. After all, didn’t we all read the second tweet? Sure, it was sent five minutes later, but she really meant it.
Any attempt to shift the context of the tweet short of a full apology is a lie. She said what she said what she said. What she said afterward had everything to do with the reaction and nothing to do with people misinterpreting what she said or ascribing motives to her that weren’t there. When she heard a Fox News cameraman died in Ukraine, her first thought was apparently, “Hmm. I think there’s a way to use this against Tucker Carlson.”
And so she did, although the only reputation she damaged was her own.
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