On an October 14 podcast, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said of Tucker Carlson, a critic of the Iran war, “that demon must have got into him”. The Christian Post put the line in its headline on October 19. The headline’s subject is an ambassador and its object is another man’s mind. Huckabee “suggests” Carlson is possessed and mentally ill, and the outlet hands the suggestion to the reader as the news: the planted claim, an insult quoted as the story. The demon sits inside quotation marks, so it belongs to Huckabee. The diagnosis “mentally ill” sits outside them, in the headline’s own voice, though his recorded word was “mentally off”. What the sentence leaves out is the argument. The headline gives no view of Carlson’s at all. The 11th paragraph does: Carlson opposed U.S. intervention in Iran on Israel’s behalf and broke with Trump after lobbying against it in the Oval Office in late February. One line from one podcast stands in for the whole quarrel, and a demon cannot be debated. A war policy and a critic’s case against it drop out; a soul takes their place. The reader’s mind lets the title do the proving: an ambassador’s word on a man’s inner state arrives sounding like a finding, not an opinion. Asked whether he was serious, Huckabee said “I don’t know what it is.” The page itself notes that Eric Metaxas, Dinesh D’Souza and Rod Dreher have made the same demonic suggestion. The tell to keep: when a headline’s charge sits in someone else’s quotation marks, look for the paragraph where the speaker is asked if he means it.
