By David Farrell
The political response to Trudeau’s election call
CBC’s At Issue panel acts knowing on the first day of the federal election campaign and how Justin Trudeau justified the election call. Plus, how the conversation around vaccine mandates and Afghanistan could shape the campaign.
Are they telling the truth? The Star launches federal election fact check
As the Star fact-checker for this upcoming election campaign, I’ve got a tough job ahead of me. Here’s how it’s going to work: each week I’ll be focusing on one major party leader, starting with the one with the fewest seats and ending with our current prime minister, Justin Trudeau. This week, it’s Green Leader Annamie Paul’s turn.
You’ll hear from me at the end of the week with a roundup of everything that leader said and how truthful it really was. – Lex Harvey, Toronto Star
By the numbers
– Source: payscale
Freshly scrubbed and pressed: Preening Taliban fighters in presidential palace in Kabul
Brit student claims he’s stuck in Afghanistan after visiting ‘on holiday’
Miles Routledge, 21, is a Loughborough University student who says he is currently holding out in a safehouse while he waits for an opportunity to flee the country and come back home to the UK.
On social media, he shared a status explaining how he wanted to test himself by visiting 'the worst places in the world' instead of opting for a standard holiday at the beach. – Anish Vis, Lad Bible
China’s state media reports Taliban takeover was ‘smoother than the US presidential transition’
The mocking opinion was tweeted out on August 15 by Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a state-affiliated media outlet in China. – Cheryl Teh, Yahoo! News
Taliban In Afghanistan: Why Taliban rule haunts women
Flashback: The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan
Fox News’ secret sauce
Fox has lost tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue since 2018, when Tucker Carlson intensified his anti-immigrant vitriol. This year, he got behind replacement theory… Carlson whips up white frenzy and fidelity by playing the victim of “cancel culture.”
Angelo Carusone, Media Matters for America’s chief executive, said Fox is insulated from ad revenue loss because it relies on unusually high subscriber fees. Cable and satellite TV subscribers fund Fox whether they watch it or not. “Fox News could have zero dollars in ad revenue and still have a 90% profit margin,” Carusone said.
Tens of millions of households pay for Fox, even though only 3.5 million of those are Fox viewers. – Jean Guerrero, Los Angeles Times
Tucker Carlson has long been a deadly-boring, dull racist
It’s clear by now that Carlson doesn’t actually have anything interesting or original to contribute to American public discourse. His against-type ideas—a post-Iraq skepticism of foreign military intervention, an aversion to traditional GOP economic orthodoxy—are hardly novel these days, and they’re nothing he came up with on his own. Besides, his heterodox positions are hardly his greatest priority. Some news outlets have tried to cast Carlson as a populist provocateur or a speaker of unspoken truths. The reality is that he’s become something else: incredibly boring. – Matt Ford, TNR
What is Tucker Carlson's net worth?
It is believed that Tucker Carlson has a net worth of about US$30M.
He makes about $6M per year at Fox News, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
The 2016 premiere episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, which replaced On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, was the network's most-watched telecast of the year in the time slot with 3.7million viewers.
By October 2020, Tucker Carlson Tonight averaged 5.3million viewers, with the show's monthly average becoming the highest of any cable news program in history at that point. – The U.S. Sun
Nobody cool likes Tucker Carlson
An original song by Austin Archer, an LA-based actor, singer-songwriter, director/choreographer, and scriptwriter.
