Eoin Higgins writes:

Greenwald has been a Fox News partisan for some time, in near-perfect correlation to how often he’s invited on the network. Carlson has hosted Greenwald numerous times, while gaining his unswerving loyalty.

What this loyalty has meant in real terms is relentless pro-Carlson arguments from Greenwald. He has seldom criticized Carlson or Fox News — as I detailed last year — and his deference has paid off with a near-weekly slot appearing on Carlson’s primetime show. (Greenwald challenged me to come on his show and hash out our differences. When I replied with a list of dates and times I could do so, he did not respond.)

Greenwald argues to critics that his appearances on Carlson’s show allow him to get a pro-privacy, anti-war message out to the network’s viewers. Yet more often than not, he’s just on Fox News to talk about Twitter, liberals and some aspect of the culture wars.

For all of Greenwald’s claims that his presence on the show might shift at least a few Fox viewers from rabid right-wing ideologues to something approaching social libertarianism, his actual appearances seem to serve mainly to support Carlson’s worldview. Greenwald doesn’t challenge Carlson’s worldview, seldom if ever criticizes the right and generally stays in his lane — legitimizing the Fox News narrative.

Thus it was unsurprising that after the Buffalo shooting, Greenwald went out of his way to make outlandish defensive claims about that worldview. One of the main points Greenwald has hammered repeatedly is the idea that Carlson is simply reacting to liberals, who are really the folks spreading conspiracy theories. [Continue reading…]