Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Thursday renewed hostilities with former colleague Shepard Smith with a sarcastic segment in which he faux-praised the now-CNBC anchor’s report on a grocery store in Naples, Florida, where shoppers weren’t wearing masks despite the raging COVID-19 pandemic.
“We spend an awful lot of time beating up on journalists and the sorry state of journalism. But we don’t want it to be all negative,” Carlson declared at the top of the mean-spirited segment. “Of course, we’ll hold up the miscreants for abuse, but we also want to celebrate the good guys once in a while.”
“Tonight we want to bring you the story of a genuine investigative journalist, a man who’s been forgotten,” he continued, mocking Smith’s news report as “the story of a lifetime.”
“If Pulitzer Prizes still mattered, and they don’t, this would get a Pulitzer,” snarked Carlson. “You have seen the Zapruder film. You’ve seen the moon landing. You’ve never seen anything like this.”
Carlson later took issue with Smith’s description of the scene in the grocery store as “pre-pandemic,” declaring: “Sorry, overheated news guy. That’s not actually news.”
Smith has not responded to Carlson’s comments, shared online by The Daily Beast.
In 2019, the pair sniped at each other on their respective shows. Smith called out Carlson’s partisan comments and guests, while Carlson, who often joins other Fox personalities in boosting ex-President Donald Trump, responded with thinly veiled insults.
Smith left the network later that year.
“I don’t know how some people sleep at night,” Smith said of some of his former Fox colleagues in an interview with PBS’ Christiane Amanpour last month. “I know that there are a lot of people who have propagated the lies and have pushed them forward over and over again, who are smart enough and educated enough to know better.”
Carlson in recent weeks has launched ugly verbal attacks on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), defended conspiracy theory-spouting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), argued against crackdowns on white nationalists, falsely accused CNN of removing its COVID-19 tracker and sown unfounded doubt about coronavirus vaccines.
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