Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused media “on every other channel” of acting like “state media” in coverage of President Trump’s decision to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance on Wednesday.
“Journalists ought to be skeptical of the powerful,” Carlson said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” referring to Brennan. “But they’re not. Instead, they have become Brennan’s faithful hand-maidens.”
“What they’re telling us on the other channels all day long is that it’s somehow immoral for us to ask obvious questions, like why would John Brennan have security clearance as an NBC employee?” he said. Brennan is an NBC News contributor.
“[They argue] that he and his colleagues in the intelligence world are not bound by the same rules that you and I are,” Carlson continued. “The intelligence establishment does what it wants, they tell us. Your job is to obey. They are in charge; you are a serf. They spy on you without limit. You accept a life with no privacy.”
Carlson added that every other network was promoting a message that “insolence is disloyalty” and that “dissent is treason.”
“That is state media,” he charged. “The definition of it.”
The comments from Carlson came just hours after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that Trump had revoked Brennan’s security clearance.
In addition, Sanders said that the White House was reviewing access to classified information for former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, among others.
Many Democratic lawmakers and former intelligence officials seized on this development as evidence that Trump was targeting officials who are critical of him.
Brennan has been one of the Trump’s harshest critics. On Tuesday, he tweeted that Trump would never understand what it means to be president after Trump called a former White House aide a “lowlife” and a “dog.”
Carlson, a noted supporter of Trump’s, in July criticized Trump for walking back comments made in a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Carlson at the time charged that Trump “bowed” before U.S. intelligence officials by claiming afterward that he misspoke when he refused to denounce Russian election interference.