(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) CNN’s leftist shill Bakari Sellers might set a world record for eating crow, and in the process showcase a brutal reality facing mainstream media and its future outside an isolated echo chamber.
Leading up to Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate, broadcast by Fox News, legacy media savored a potential opportunity to take pot shots at Donald Trump’s absence from the stage. The former president opted, instead, to sit for an interview with Tucker Carlson on his X, formerly Twitter, platform.
“Donald Trump’s counter-programming is horrible,” Sellers declared. “I don’t think anybody is going to be watching Tucker Carlson on Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s called now.”
Turned out, it was called a landslide of epic proportions. Carlson and Trump’s “counter-programming” on X dismantled mainstream media and took a sledgehammer to the Biden regime and the multiple sham indictments its DOJ has unleashed to disrupt the 2024 election.
The interview’s first 10 minutes reportedly amassed 20 million views, 100,000 likes and 35,000 reposts.
“RIP Fox News and the corporate media,” Trending Politics’ Collin Rugg tweeted. “This interview will be record breaking.”
Collins’s prescience outshined CNN’s dark soothsaying as glaringly as Trump’s interview overshadowed Fox News’ debate and the eight candidates on stage.
In less than four hours after the interview premiered on X, it had topped 100 million views, snagged more than 439,500 likes and was reposted with more than 124,400 shares, “completely overshadowing all of television programming on Wednesday night,” Trump’s campaign announced.
BREAKING: Tucker Carlson’s interview with Donald Trump reaches 100M views on 𝕏 pic.twitter.com/GcZBg23BsK
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) August 24, 2023
Trump’s response to one of Carlson’s opening questions helped explain those numbers. “Do you think television is declining?” the former Fox host asked the former president. “I think cable’s down because it’s lost credibility,” Trump said, citing MSNBC as a prime example and speaking to corporate media in general.
“It’s so wrong, what they write and what they do and what they say. It’s fake news, as I said. I think I came up with that term. I hope I did because it’s a good one,” Trump said, adding a caveat.
“It’s not tough enough anymore. It’s corrupt news, but somehow that doesn’t play as nicely. But it is corrupt news.”
Whatever the moniker, the viewing public is increasingly tuning out, Trump said, referencing CNN “who absolutely is doing no ratings at all. I mean they’re dead.”
The reason was because “they really don’t have credibility,” Trump said, adding the GOP’s debate host network into the mix.
“Fox is way down, as you know, and the good old days are long ago,” Trump said, in a nod to the network’s plummeting ratings since Carlson’s ouster.
“It could come back, but they just don’t have a lot of credibility. Tucker, you know that better than anybody, I think it was a terrible move, getting rid of you,” Trump said.
“You were number one on television, and all of a sudden, we’re doing this interview, but we’ll get bigger ratings using this crazy forum that you’re using, than probably the debate or the competition.”
Dang, the most viewed presidential debate of all time has 84 million views and Trump/Tucker got 75 million in the first hour!
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) August 24, 2023
MAGA spokesperson Caroline Leavitt drove home what those numbers portend not only for legacy media, but also for the GOP moving forward.
“The future of the Republican Party is not like the Republican Party of the past. It’s America First,” Leavitt told NewsMax.
“It’s with a base of voters that are not paying attention to what the legacy media tells them. So I don’t think we’re heading backwards. We’re heading forward, and tonight’s numbers really prove that,” she said of the blockbuster Carlson interview.
Ep. 19 Debate Night with Donald J Trump pic.twitter.com/ayPfII48CO
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 24, 2023
UPDATE:
⚠️ THE RATINGS ARE IN ⚠️
🚨 Fox News #GOPDebate
51 Million Viewers
🚨 Tucker Carlson X Donald Trump Interview
218 Million Views
⚠️ WOW! ⚠️
— Matt Wallace (@MattWallace888) August 24, 2023
Mark Pellin is an editor at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/sabrepaw70.
