Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are at the forefront of alternative media, grabbing more eyeballs than ever, but also wrecking the emerging medium’s credibility with loony conspiracy theories that are easily debunked. On Spotify’s chart of top news podcasts, Carlson currently holds down the top spot, while Owens lands at number 3 – The New York Times’s The Daily, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal grab the rest of the top five spots.
As traditional media continues to shed viewers and more and more Americans, especially young people, tune into podcasts and scroll social media for their news, the likes of Owens and Carlson are shaping the discourse more than ever. Unfortunately, much of their content is utter and total nonsense, and leans into age-old stereotypes and bigotry to grab headlines and remain provocative.
The divergence between the fact-based podcasts, like The Daily and WSJ, and what Owens and Carlson are peddling on their shows has never been further apart, ensuring that Americans are living in dangerously different realities.
In the weeks since Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder, Owens has unabashedly pushed conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, claiming everything from a federal cover-up, to there being a female accomplice, to suggesting his assassination was connected to Jewish and pro-Israel forces being angry with him. Carlson, too, has been out with outlandish claim after outlandish claim, including his most recent claim that Israeli military officials were “demanding” U.S. military officials inside the Pentagon do as they say during the recent Israel-Iran conflict.
Carlson, since his days at Fox News, has long been famous for “just asking questions,” and has made claim after claim over the years that have proven not to be the case. Earlier this year, he argued that Trump bombing Iran would mean “Thousands of Americans would die. We’d lose the war that follows.”
Owens famously said in March of 2024, “ I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that [French First Lady] Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.” The Macrons are now suing Owens in a 22-count defamation lawsuit. Carlson, of course, declared in March of this year, “And I was like, ‘Ah, Candace Owens, I love you, but I think this is too crazy.’ And then it turns out she’s right! My mind is blown!”
Independent journalist Nathan Livignstone put together a short clip of Carlson and Owens pushing some of their recent conspiracy theories and wrote:
The Candace Owens + Tucker Carlson School of Journalism:
Step 1: Make an outrageous claim with NO PROOF
Step 2: Demand YOU disprove it
Even Carlson and Owens’s biggest fans and defenders must understand that this is all they are doing. Clearly, they tune into them for something other than facts. At their most basic level, both Owens and Carlson profit in media by offering their viewers a sense of tribal belonging – pointing out over and over again who their perceived enemies are. While their approach certainly is working for them, Owens and Carlson are doing untold damage to both the country and the credibility of alternative media.
To be fair, many on the right have already tired of Owens’s antics. The MAGA influencer known as Catturd posted on Thursday, “Candace Owens is just a few days away of blaming Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Kermit the Frog. You know I’m right – it’s coming.”
Others, however, remain willfully blind in the name of partisanship. Megyn Kelly recently defended Carlson as her friend, and refused to condemn both Carlson and Owens over their use of Kirk’s death to spread anti-Semitism and promote themselves.
“As for my decision to ‘platform’ Tucker: Too bad. Too f*cking bad,” Kelly told a podcast this week on the topic, adding, “I don’t think he’s an anti-Semite at all.
She later added, “ I think Tucker’s a very important, valuable voice in the national conversation.”
Carlson, who is also out right now with a 9/11 truther documentary, has jumped further and further off the rails in recent months – going so far as to claim he was physically attacked by a demon. RedState columnist Bonchie highlighted one of Carlson’s recent interview subjects, Elizabeth Lane, noting, “She has 3.3K followers. No one knows who she is. She’s a 9/11 truther, pro-Putin, and an antisemite. So naturally, she gets an interview on Tucker Carlson’s show. Makes sense.”
Earlier in the week, Kelly gave the game away when she said, “My fight is with the left, not these two,” making clear that whether or not she agrees with the likes of Tucker and Candace, she will defend her tribe no matter what. And in our current state of hyper-polarization, Kelly is undoubtedly doing what’s best for business; even if it comes at the expense of upholding any kind of journalistic principles.
With Owens and Carlson leading the alternative media revolution, they have turned what could have been a journalistic project to speak truth to power into an entertainment-based grift, feeding into the worst impulses of American media consumers and sowing further division and hate.
The post Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson’s Conspiracy Theories Totally Wreck the Credibility That Alternative Media is Trying to Gain first appeared on Mediaite.
