Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has strong words for NBC News, specifically its president Noah Oppenheim.
“Noah Oppenheim ought to resign immediately, and if he doesn’t, he ought to be fired immediately by NBC’s parent company Comcast,” Carlson said Thursday on Tucker Carlson Tonight. “News executives are not allowed to tell lies. They’re not allowed to participate in cover ups. They ought to answer straight-forward questions straight forwardly. When they don’t, you know they’re corrupt, and that’s exactly what NBC News is.”
Carlson’s comments come the day after Oppenheim addressed the reasoning behind why NBC News decided not to move forward with Ronan Farrow‘s stunning story in The New Yorker detailing allegations of sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape perpetrated by Harvey Weinstein.
“We reached a point over the summer, where as an organization, we didn’t feel that we had all the elements that we needed to air it,” said Oppenheim.
Farrow told Rachel Maddow the previous evening that there were “multiple determinations that it was reportable at NBC,” but that he eventually took the story to The New Yorker, where Farrow conducted new interviews with accusers, and editors there began a thorough fact check, including verifying sources.
This saga comes just over a year after NBC News got scooped by The Washington Post, when that outlet released the Billy Bush/Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape from 2005. NBC News sat on that story for several days last October, fearing a lawsuit.
Carlson’s criticisms of NBC News, particularly his use of words like “coverup,” may come across as curious to some. His current employer cut ties with its former star on-air personality Bill O’Reilly in April after a New York Times report surfaced that Fox News secretly paid out millions of dollars over the years to settle harassment claims against him. Prior to that, Carlson’s former boss Roger Ailes resigned from Fox News amid multiple allegations of harassment.
Carlson is a former NBC Newser himself, hosting the MSNBC show Tucker from 2005-2008. Oppenheim was a senior producer on the Today show during that time.