Tucker Carlson satirized by Anderson Cooper, comedians during January 6 coverage

Cooper joined Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who challenged Carlson for distorting details of the uprising at the Capitol into a conspiracy-fueled vision that portrayed the deadly uprising as a mostly peaceful protest which involved little violence. Carlson aired clips of largely never-before-seen video from Capitol Police security cameras on Jan. 6, 2021, during his show this week after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) granted the Fox News host exclusive access to 41,000 hours of imagery.

‘Just a lie’: Senate Republicans destroy Tucker Carlson’s January 6 story

One such critic was Stephen Colbert, who denounced Carlson for picking through the cherry on top of portraying the rioters as tourists and “tourists.”

“Tourists? Tourists, really?” Jacket said. The CBS nighttime host then imagined a conversation between rioters: “Grab a rock, honey, we’re going to the Louvre.” I want to peacefully smear my bullshit on the Mona Lisa. See if she keeps smiling after that.

The criticism of Carlson’s bogus story about the Capitol uprising comes as a cache of internal communications was released Tuesday as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. The election technology company claims that Fox News seriously damaged its economic future by allowing allies of Donald Trump to falsely claim on Fox programming that it had rigged the election in favor of Joe Biden.

Included in the large selection of exhibits released Tuesday were text messages from Carlson, who defended Trump on-air but had told colleagues he “really can’t wait” to largely ignore Trump.

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson texted a colleague, according to the Exhibits. “What he’s good at is destroying things. He is the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”

The Fox News host is also facing backlash from some Senate Republicans who have broken ranks with their House GOP colleagues and criticized Carlson’s portrayal of the Capitol riot on his show this week.

“It was, in my opinion, a mistake by Fox News to portray this in a way that completely contradicts what our chief law enforcement officer here at the Capitol thinks,” McConnell told reporters. Sen. Kevin Cramer (RN.D.) added: “To put it one way or another [Jan. 6] falling into the same category as an allowed peaceful protest is just a lie.”

Carlson criticized McConnell and other Republicans Tuesday night and found support from Senator Josh Hawley after Carlson claimed the video of the Missouri senator running from the Capitol was a “lie.”

“I love it,” Hawley told reporters. “I’m glad he’s doing what he’s doing.”

However, cable news and late-night hosts thought things were not going well for Carlson.

“It’s an attempt to rewrite history on what is one of the most profound, certainly one of the greatest events in American democracy, the greatest threat to American democracy,” CNN’s Cooper said in his segment with Fanone.

On CBS, Colbert criticized McCarthy for making promises to the far-right House Freedom Caucus so he could become a speaker, including giving Carlson exclusive access to the Capitol Police footage.

“They desperately needed someone, anyone, to make propaganda to make it look like [Jan. 6, 2021] wasn’t a problem so they can stay in office and maybe do a better coup next time,” Colbert said on CBS. “And McCarthy kept his promise.”

After Colbert joked that the rioters “lined up nicely to smash those windows,” the host ran a video of what the movie “Jaws” would have looked like if Carlson had covered the fiction film. Instead of a terrifying great white shark eating innocent swimmers, “The Late Show” joked that Carlson’s depiction would have made the shark into a cute kid singing “Baby Shark.”

Comedian Marlon Wayans joked about Carlson’s new story on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” saying, “According to Fox News, we just had the wrong images.” Like Colbert, Wayans, who hosted Tuesday’s show, disagreed that Carlson viewed the rioters as “tourists.”

“If you have to hit a cop when you go in, you’re not looking around, you’re fighting,” Wayans said.

Seth Meyers took a different approach to his NBC show. The host put the entire saga involving McCarthy and Carlson providing the footage into terms that fans of “The Simpsons” could easily understand.

‘You know we can see what you’re doing, right? Kevin McCarthy, who is Trump’s Waylon Smithers, gives all the footage to Tucker, Tucker only shows the tame parts, and then Trump claims the rioters were set up,” Meyers said. “It’s like watching a magic show where the magician wears see-through sleeves.”

At the end of a day when both Democratic and Republican lawmakers questioned Carlson and Fox for broadcasting the footage and portraying the riot as mostly peaceful, the hosts agreed that important context was missing from the Fox host’s show this week.

“The one thing Tucker Carson has proven is that you can make everything better by not showing the bad,” Wayans said.

Sarah Ellison, Paul Kane, Marianna Sotomayor, Liz Goodwin, and Tom Jackman contributed to this report.