The kerfuffle is interesting in part because those critics are among the rare Hollywood power brokers with appeal that extends beyond liberals and progressives—on Adam Carolla’s popular right-leaning podcast, for instance, Modern Family, Apatow, and MacFarlane are all praised as regularly as is Carlson.

But it is most noteworthy, at least among Carlson observers, for its jarring dissonance with what the commentator told America about the news media before his latest reinvention: He warned that the consequences are dire if a people charged with self-government loses confidence in mainstream sources of information.

To quote him:

In a democracy, it is vital that citizens have a common frame of reference for reality. There has to be a place where all citizens can go and look at facts about what happened yesterday and say you know what, I agree that’s probably roughly what happened. The electorate’s confidence in the news being real is all important. You see this when you go to other countries that don’t have a history of a straightforward, honest press––places like Pakistan where I’ve spent a lot of time, where the press has always been dishonest, every newspaper is an organ of a political movement or other, and people have come over time to be really cynical about the press. They don’t believe anything that is written in newspapers because they assume that all of it is just another man’s view, all of it is bias. And so in the absence of any recognized standard or source of news, what happens? Well, rumors take the place of news. So ultimately you have an electorate that is really poorly informed and incredibly suspicious, and in that environment all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories bloom and take the place of facts. I think the American press does a pretty good job having spent time abroad in the past 15 years. Whatever hangups I have or whatever anger I feel toward news coverage I try to compare that with things I’ve seen abroad and I think we’re doing a pretty good job by comparison. But we’re still not living up to the standard we set for ourselves in the press.

Then in 2009, he rose to the podium at CPAC, an annual gathering of movement conservatives, and defended the fact-gathering of The New York Times:

If I could just say, and I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, I lived here in the 1990s, and I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations. And I saw many of those organizations prosper and I saw many of them fail. And here’s the difference. The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth and conservatives need to deal with this. I believe this. I’m as conservative as any person in this room. I am literally in the process of stockpiling food and moving to Idaho, so I am not in any way going to take a second seat to anyone in this room ideologically. But I will say, honestly, if you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail. You will fail. The New York Times is a liberal paper. But it’s also—and it is to its core a liberal paper—it’s also a paper that cares about whether the spell people’s names right, by and large. It’s a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions. (boos) That’s the truth! You don’t believe me? (more boos). The New York Times? You don’t think—why isn’t there—(inaudible) But I’m not saying they’re not. I’m merely saying that at the core of their news gathering operation is gathering news. (Someone shots “No!”) And conservatives need to do the same! Yes, they are liberal, yes they twist it, but they are still out there finding the facts and bringing them to people. (“No!”) You can believe it or not! But conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations. They need to go out there and find what is happening, find actually what is going on, not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media, but gather the news themselves. That’s expensive, it’s difficult, and it is worth doing. And Fox News is a great example of that and there ought to be more.

That same year, appearing on C-SPAN, he was asked about the proliferation of cable and internet news sources. “Has it helped us grow more informed,” the host asked, “or has it made the landscape so confusing we’re struggling to keep up?”