On Cuomo’s NewsNation show, O’Reilly acknowledge the interview’s sky-high ratings but dissed Carlson’s declining viewership in the 8 p.m. time slot he inherited from O’Reilly.
“He couldn’t hold it,” O’Reilly said of the ratings decline, “nobody could have, and if you want to say I’m bragging, fine.”
When Cuomo said that O’Reilly was wrong and said Carlson had the largest audience in cable history, O’Reilly interrupted:
You believe what you want to believe; I just gave you the truth. Tucker Carlson fell off a million one in a year from what I did. So he had to change, and he did, and he did it in a very sincere way. He wasn’t a phony, all right? He’s not contrived. He said, “You know what? I’m going to reflect the grievance of a certain amount of people in America and I’m going to do what Black Lives Matter does. I’m going to pipe that grievance in, get people emotionally involved with me in my program, and they’ll watch. And it worked.
“He never topped what I did, didn’t come close to topping it, but he was the highest rated show,” O’Reilly added.
Mediaite continues:
O’Reilly went on to challenge Cuomo for not pushing back harder on Carlson for claiming that Moscow is a better-run city than any metropolis in America.
“If he had said it to me, I would have said, ‘You know, you sound like Charles Lindbergh in 1938 who went over to Germany and was very impressed how orderly it was, how clean it was. There wasn’t any graffiti. There wasn’t any anything. Everybody did what they were told to do and totalitarian regimes can make that happen fairly easily,” observed O’Reilly. “Now, are you impressed with the totalitarian regime? That would have been my question, because I want to know why Tucker Carlson has presented Putin and his government in a fairly benign way. Okay? That’s what I wanna know. I’m a journalist and I’m curious.
“He told you what his answer would have been: Because that’s what he saw. And that’s the way Tucker formulates opinions, experientially,” replied Cuomo. “He goes to Moscow, he thinks it’s clean and that’s all he knows so he says it’s great, it’s clean, because he doesn’t know the rest of the story. That’s the answer. There’s no mystery.”
“Okay, but the interviewer has to tell the rest of the story. But you can’t do that if you’re trying to have détente because you don’t want to make Tucker Carlson look bad,” shot back O’Reilly.
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