There’s an app that allows you to take a photo of a large pile of Legos and it will show you different things you can construct. I admittedly haven’t tried it, but the concept is fascinating; the more you give it, the more you can construct. Theoretically, given a big enough pile of Legos, including pieces of hundreds of different sets, you could cobble together pretty much anything.
This is how it works with information, too. The explosion of data and facts and comments and rhetoric has allowed people to cobble together all sorts of things, from intricate explanations of the human condition to the QAnon conspiracy theory. After all, what is QAnon besides the selective interpretation of various pieces of real-world information? It’s mostly pieces of real things assembled into a deranged narrative. A big pile of facts with plenty of available guides for conspiratorial assembly.
What matters here is the instruction set. If the Lego app only showed you how to make functioning weapons (somehow), our assessment of it would probably be quite different. Who is picking out the pieces controls what is being made.
Which, in a nutshell, is why it’s an extremely bad idea to grant Fox News’s Tucker Carlson the power to construct whatever narrative he wants out of the footage captured at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) granted Carlson access to tens of thousands of hours of footage from the Capitol, as was first reported by Axios on Monday morning. By Monday evening, Carlson was already teasing his team’s examination of the footage on his Fox News show.
“Some of our smartest producers have been there looking at this stuff and trying to figure out what it means and how it contradicts, or not, the story that we’ve been told for more than two years,” Carlson told his viewers. “We think, already, that in some ways it does contradict that story.”
Well, of course. McCarthy dumped a big pile of Legos in front of the “Conspiracy Theory Constructor” app, and it’s already churning out things that can be built.
Carlson assured his audience that his team was reviewing the footage “as honestly as we can,” which is probably true — but not in the way Carlson means it. Carlson has an extensive record of making dishonest, unchecked claims on his program, with Fox attorneys even admitting he should not be considered an objective source of information. His false claims include a litany of debunked or unfounded assertions about the Jan. 6 riot.
Carlson promoted false and debunked claims about government agents stoking the riot, from the wife of an accused rioter (whom he later interviewed on his show without comment) to elevating evidence-free and obviously flimsy claims about a man named Ray Epps to a national audience. He produced a widely debunked three-part series aimed at reframing the Capitol riot in a way that attributed responsibility to government actors — and slotted the response to the riot in his exhaustingly simplistic us-vs.-them narrative. When the House select committee investigating the riot first aired a hearing in prime time, Carlson’s show was an ad-free hour of handing the microphone to riot sympathizers and conspiracy theorists.
It’s not just that Carlson cannot be relied upon to actually consider the video in an objective way, though he certainly can’t be. It’s also that there is no reason to think that he will present the video in context, to include information that moderates what’s being shown on the screen. He’d certainly accuse the Jan. 6 committee of a similar fault, with some justification. But we’ve seen recent examples of right-wing actors cherry-picking details from large pools of data to make a rhetorical point in a way that seems instructive.
Late last year, after Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter, he reached out to a number of writers with demonstrated sympathy for the idea that the discourse was being polluted by some sort of elitist groupthink. Musk offered them the opportunity to peruse internal documents from the pre-Musk Twitter. Lo and behold, those writers began to use snippets of information to make public allegations that Twitter had been part of the pollution of the discourse by elitist groupthink.
Detailed analyses of those claims showed precisely where they fell short, from internal inconsistencies to excluded context. But Elon Musk had a big pile of Legos and he opened up the ol’ “Woke Mind Virus Constructor” app.
The entire point is that — given enough pieces of information, a motivated builder and a credulous audience — you can make whatever argument you want. Take a cache of emails from a senior official with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and you can create a conspiracy theory that leads to a guy firing a rifle at a D.C. pizza joint. Take 44,000 hours of footage from the Capitol and who knows what you can cobble together.
To extend the Lego analogy, the most important factor is the app you’re choosing. Right-wing voices, including Carlson, criticized the House select committee for offering a motivated presentation of the riot, with some justification. Imagine, though, if then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had in 2021 given the Capitol riot footage to Rachel Maddow’s team to evaluate. How might McCarthy have viewed that? Carlson?
There is an additional irony here. The reason that the riot occurred in the first place was that Donald Trump cherry-picked information and rhetoric about the 2020 election to bolster an argument that it had been stolen from him — an obviously false assertion. In other words, the attack on the Capitol that threatened the lives of legislators like McCarthy was heavily dependent on bad-faith assessments of a big pool of numbers and anecdotes.
We should have no confidence that Tucker Carlson will do anything but use the video to which he’s been given access for anything other than promoting his own narrative. And while McCarthy may think this is a short-term public-relations win for his side, he should understand that Carlson’s narrative is nearly as destructive to the Republican establishment as to the Democratic one.
McCarthy picked a bad app.