Tucker Carlson opened his show Tuesday night wondering why the media seemingly went from fawning over former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke to South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
WATCH:
“Imagine how it must feel to be to be Beto O’Rourke right now,” Carlson began. “If you’re O’Rourke, you’re out there running for president really hard, or at least running for vice president. You are running anyway. You are giving speech after speech every day: ‘Children are our future. Today the first day of the rest of your life.’ Inspiring stuff like that, deep stuff like that, and there is a physical component to the job, too,” Carlson began. “You’re riding your skateboard for the camera taking God knows how many selfies for your fans on Snapchat and Instagram.”
He continued, “It is not an easy gig. Then one morning you wake up and discover that your one true love, the American news media, have called it off. They’ve left you for a younger, hotter candidate. Went out for a pack of cigarettes and just never came home. They split with some guy from Indiana. You cannot even pronounce the guy’s name.” (RELATED: Why Does Pete Buttigieg Think Mike Pence Has A ‘Problem’ With Being Gay?)
Carlson then showed a montage of clips of CNN, MSNBC and The View, in which either hosts or guests fawned over Buttigieg.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Buttigieg’s name was mentioned on the cable news networks a total of 366 times from April 7-13, earning him second place out of the entire field of approximately twenty presidential candidates. Only independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had his name mentioned more frequently, at 664 times. In the same time frame, however, O’Rourke had his name mentioned 136 times, the sixth-most often.
Comparatively, the week before, O’Rourke finished second in mentions, behind Sanders and ahead of Buttigieg.
In the most recent Emerson poll published Monday, Buttigieg came in third, garnering 9% of the respondents with O’Rourke one percentage point behind him.