Is a conversation between Chris Cuomo and Tucker Carlson really the cure we need?

At some point in our lives, all of us have shared polite verbal exchanges with people whose political, cultural and social views are diametrically opposed to our own. Most of us call this Thanksgiving dinner. But it happens at weddings and birthday parties, on the sidelines at your kid’s soccer practice or any place where crowds gather and people talk.

This is what Chris Cuomo wants for America. “At the end of the day, what matters is how we connect as human beings,” the former CNN anchor said in the opening segment of Monday’s “Cuomo,” his show on NewsNation.

“Conversation is the cure,” Cuomo added. “When you talk to someone instead of about them, it's very different. Civility. Decency. Openness. The humanity.”

Sure. Entire community movements are devoted to bringing together those who hold diametric perspectives to discover what they have in common and build relationships.

Conversation can also be molded to suit our agenda. This is why Cuomo’s insistence on describing his sit-down with Tucker Carlson as such – a conversation, not an interview – set off alarms among skeptics.

While Carlson hosted the highest-rated show on cable news, he used his platform to spew racist rhetoric every night, including promoting the "great replacement” conspiracy popular among white supremacists. This alleges that liberals are plotting to replace white Americans with people of color by, for example, loosening immigration policy and allowing non-citizens to vote illegally.

Cuomo didn’t broach this or anything about race on Monday’s shiplap-side chat, saving it for Tuesday’s sequel, along with touching on Carlson’s thoughts about women and his false portrayals of the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

I am not averse to the conversational model in news. There’s an ease in that approach that, when done well, can be disarming and reveal more about the subject and the host than a direct Q&A might uncover, since that method tends to place both parties in guarded positions.

It’s also possible to engage in probing conversations and push back against inconsistencies without abandoning any earned sense of comity with the other person.

What I take issue with is Cuomo’s failure to interrogate the human cost of Carlson’s six and a half years of fulminating against anyone who doesn't look like him or think like him on "Tucker Carlson Tonight." 

Here’s what Carlson told Cuomo on Tuesday about women: “They want to be married and have children. And that is the thing that the Democratic party prevents them from having through policy,” he said. “And the reason they do that is because the single most important constituency, as you well know, is not Black voters . . . No, it's unmarried women of all races.

“And so they do a lot of different things to discourage marriage and fertility,” he continued. “ . . . They actively work to prevent women from forming families. And I think that's evil, and I don't think it serves women at all. That's my view.”

What does Cuomo offer in response? “It is your view. I disagree. I see it differently.” From there the show cut to a break.

Huh.

Conversations can be politely contentious and leave spectators with more knowledge about oppositional paradigms without necessarily changing how they feel about the other person. That has value.

As Cuomo said at the end of the broadcast, “My goal is not for you to like or dislike Tucker Carlson. The whole point is that we don’t have to demonize what and who we disagree with. It’s not working.” That's also fair. To anyone who hasn’t been demonized by Tucker Carlson.

As a reminder, in 2018 Carlson told Fox News viewers that immigration “makes our country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided,” and contended in 2019 that white supremacy is a hoax.

By the way, Cuomo said this to a Brooklyn woman named Dee Dee who praised Cuomo for “getting [her] to like Tucker, so you’ve accomplished what you wanted to do.”

In trying to present a sensible alternative to the combative shouting matches passed off as news coverage Cuomo, at least in this instance, creates a fresh problem. Or, if not that, he aggravates an existing tendency to rebrand the furthering of stereotypes and dangerous misinformation as “a difference of opinion.”

Cuomo’s insistence on having "conversations we need to be having" is why he rejects calls to de-platform people like Carlson, who now posts episodes of his show on X – or Candace Owens, with whom he appeared on a recent podcast.

De-platforming, he says, “plays like censorship, and you're seeing it more and more. And I would be fine with it if it was getting us to a better place. But it isn’t. None of it is. All of it is adding to the division.”

He goes on to ask, “Why is there no consensus at least on common concerns?”  

But let’s consider the context in which we’re parsing these ideas about conversation as medicine. The same concepts Cuomo touts as curatives – civility, decency, openness – can become masks we don to put our best face forward, especially in hostile territory.

It follows that Cuomo’s chat with Carlson was entirely cordial and often wandered thanks to Carlson's redirection. Cuomo did push back on some of Carlson's wilder claims, such as his characterization of January 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt as an unarmed innocent who was killed for no reason.

He also expressed envy for Carlson’s dark hair. (Maybe this is why Elon Musk curiously dubbed the two-part back-and-forth “The Cuomover.”)

Monday’s segment began with Cuomo revealing he reached out to Carlson after he was fired from Fox News a year ago, to offer his sympathy. Fox News has never specified why Carlson was let go, but the ouster occurred shortly after the network settled with Dominion Voting Systems – and after a series of blatantly racist and sexist texts Carlson wrote were leaked to the public.

But again, this dialogue is not about that. Cuomo expressed that he knew the pain of being fired – which he was, in part for trying to use his position as CNN's top-rated anchor to unearth information on the women who accused his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, of sexual harassment. 

“I knew the pain of it, and I knew the challenge of it, but I do believe that one of the lessons I've learned is you have to think about how other people are being affected by situations, especially once you have paid in your own life,” Cuomo said.

Carlson expressed his appreciation for that sentiment, especially considering all the unprovoked vitriol he spewed about Cuomo on his show.

“I think you had good reason not to like me. I think that that would be fair,” Carlson responded.

Here is the main sticking point in Cuomo’s approach to figures like Carlson and, to reference his explanation of why he offered an olive branch, emphasizing that Carlson is “somebody who you should care about as a human being.”

For years Carlson offered no such consideration to anyone who doesn’t comport with his image of acceptable Americans. When mass shooters echoed some of the hateful convictions he spouted night after night on Fox News, both he and his former network distanced themselves from those associations for a time only to resume the script once the furor ebbed.

“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,' if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said in April 2021. “But they become hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it! That's true.”

When Cuomo brought up Carlson’s frequent forwarding of replacement theory, he alleged, “I’ve never said 'white people.' I said the current — people who were born here, many of whom are not white. Though the attacks on white people are one of the biggest things that’s happened in our country.” 

NewsNation launched in 2021 with the goal of providing an unbiased alternative to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The network hired the man his former CNN colleague Don Lemon called “both sides Cuomo” in 2022. This is taken from The Hollywood Reporter’s 2019 profile of Cuomo, in which Lemon qualified his agreement with Cuomo’s insisting on hearing from all sides by saying, “If the side is propaganda and lies, I don’t think you need to hear that.”

Which brings us to Cuomo on “Cuomo” in 2024. When Carlson confidently declares, “I have never one time been yelled at by a non-white person,'” nobody shares the many reasons as to why that may be. And who is Cuomo to doubt him?

“I don't have any problem with you owning any of these opinions that you do,” he said Monday as he pushed back on Carlson’s justification of his chummy sit down with Russian president Vladimir Putin in February. “. . . I can have my own opinion about the level of sufficiency of your reasoning.”

“But I think you'd find it unimpeachable,” Carlson said.

“Oh, it's definitely not unimpeachable,” Cuomo replied.

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Cuomo’s approach, as demonstrated on Monday and Tuesday night, is flawed because his concept of “both sides” is flawed. It gives equal weight to fact-based logic and agenda-driven paranoia. It can assist in camouflaging incitements to harm and passing off misinformation as truth. Worse, it may help smooth over the image of someone like Carlson by presenting him as a "philosopher," as one "Cuomo" caller described him.

Who else agrees with the perceptions Carlson shares with millions of followers? Well, the replacement theory has been cited by the man who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, and the man who killed 23 people and injured 22 others inside an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019. The man who drove to the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York in 2022 with the explicit mission of killing Black people, and who ended 11 lives and injured two other people, wrote a 180-page manifesto quoting parts of it.

In 2022, "Tucker Carlson Tonight" pulled an average audience of 3.3 million per broadcast. 

This is why, when Carlson talks about his wife telling him, “You're not a mean person,” a natural conversational follow-up would be to ask if he’s aware of the harm he’s caused to everyday people, harm that widens the division Cuomo is trying to heal. I mean, it would be for me, but what do I know? I'm just a Black woman who has never yelled at Tucker Carlson.

Anyway, maybe that reflection didn't occur to Cuomo because of the most obvious commonality between him and Carlson: Neither has actual or figurative skin in the game when it comes to extremist lawmakers, people Carlson has influenced, passing bills that adversely impact people in marginalized communities. 

The NewsNation host's noncommittal verdict at the end of it all is that Carlson’s opinions, “to me, seem to a large degree almost entirely experiential.” Meaning, his insights on how the world works and what’s wrong with it are entirely based on his limited interactions with other people and places.

Cuomo counters that his judgements are not just a function of his own experience, and perhaps that’s true.

As media analysts suspected, there are NewsNation viewers who now feel better about Carlson, evidenced by Dee Dee’s feedback and praise from another caller who offered the see-no-color-and-therefore-no-racism bromide of, “There's one race: the human race.”

Cuomo is correct when he says that figures like Carlson will always find a bullhorn. That's the nature of the internet age — anyone can build a following through podcasts and social media posts. That being the case, who is really being served by this caliber of conversation? I’m not sure it's us.