Bill O’Reilly Blasts Tucker Carlson For Doing ‘What Black Lives Matter Does’ in Debate With Chris Cuomo Over Their Interview

Bill O’Reilly took shots at Tucker Carlson in a debate with Chris Cuomo on Wednesday during a segment on the latter’s show dedicated to breaking down Cuomo and Carlson’s recent interview.

After acknowledging that their conversation was a ratings success, O’Reilly said he would “never do it” the way Cuomo had.

“I would never in a million years do it because my thrust as a journalist is clarity. So I want to know why Tucker Carlson believes what he believes,” began O’Reilly. “I know why he presents the way he does. I know that because when he took over for me in 2017, he inherited an 8 o’clock slot where 4,200,000 viewers watched the first quarter of ’17. He couldn’t hold it, nobody could have, and if you want to say I’m bragging, fine.”

“No, because the research says he had the biggest audience in the history of cable television,” interjected Cuomo.

O’Reilly insisted that was a “falsehood” before continuing on with his point:

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,” conceded O’Reilly.

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.

He continued:

And you said it, this isn’t a gotcha, this isn’t about topping, this is about hearing what the man has to say, all right. But I said to Leland Vittert on Monday: This is a hard interview with Tucker Carlson because there’s no baseline of fact. Tucker traffics in emotion. That’s what he does and it’s almost like Donald Trump. The presentation’s very similar. Trump is promoting grievance about himself and his crew. That’s what he does. That is his main campaign thing. Now, he governed fairly well if you go by the economy and things like that, but his presentation is much like Tucker’s, all right? It’s get him in they’re after us, they’re ruining the country, we got to get them. That’s not going to change no matter how many conversations you have, because there is legitimate grievance. There’s legitimate grievance in the African-American community and in the white community. It’s there!

The two cable news personalities went on to again spar over whether Cuomo had demonized O’Reilly and who had better ratings, Carlson or O’Reilly before Cuomo rested his defense of the interview.

“I’ll tell you the metric that matters to me: The response. Bill, I have never had more people say more please than they did. Not because on the right they’re crazy about listening to me, not because on the left they’re crazy about listening to Carlson, but it’s so different than having what they’re supposed to believe jammed down their face and instead understanding that whatever Tucker believes about Putin or Moscow, he clearly is worried that our leadership is not competent anymore. So am I,” said Cuomo.

“The common concerns are there,” he added. “And cable TV and a lot of the media and a lot of our punditry only plays to one side and doesn’t let people do what they always did. That’s why I did it. And more people accepted that than I’ve ever had happen before.”

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