HOWARD KURTZ: Tucker, you have a nuclear explosion in the media over this --
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
KURTZ: --over a decade old tape, Republicans baling right and left. Now look, the words are disturbing.
CARLSON: Yeah, they are.
KURTZ: They are indefensible, but I was watching CNN and MSNBC -- I mean, it's on hour after hour after hour. Is the news business overplaying this just a bit?
TUCKER CARLSON: The words are indefensible, they're not inexplicable, and that's why the coverage is so misleading. I mean, nobody is actually shocked by this and everyone is pretending to be. So it's --
KURTZ: Manufactured outrage?
CARLSON: It's entirely manufactured. It's totally ersatz. This was one of the recurring guests on The Howard Stern Show. This is Donald Trump. So everyone knew that Trump is capable of this. Everyone who knows Trump knows he speaks like this in real life, maybe not this extreme, but in the ballpark. What bothers me is two things. One, the press has no moral standing to judge anyone who talks like this, having spent 25 years in newsrooms. This is not -- you know what I mean? Spare me the pearl clutching.
KURTZ: You have heard plenty of locker room talk.
CARLSON: I have. But the other point I would make is it's misleading to pretend Trump is being abandoned by the Republican leadership because they are so outraged. John McCain is not pulling his support of Trump because he's offended -- that this Navy veteran is so offended by this -- he just doesn't agree with Trump on the issues and he thinks being connected to Trump hurts him politically.
