Did comedian Jim Carrey say that shutting down national media for 30 days would eliminate 80% of the world's problems? No, that's not true: Carrey's publicist confirmed he never made the statement.
The claim was implied in a Facebook post (archived here) published on April 6, 2020. The post features an image of Carrey with this quote underneath:
I say we close down the national media for 30 days and watch 80% of the world's problem go away.
The caption of the post read:
I had to share this....my exact thoughts.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook on August 11, 2021:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Aug 11 21:20:41 2021 UTC)
In an email to Lead Stories on August 11, 2021, Carrey's publicist Marleah Leslie said of the quote, which was attached to the email:
The statement below was not made by Jim Carrey.
There are earlier appearances of the quote online that have not been attributed to Carrey. A tweet (archived here) from March 14, 2020, contained the statement, as did this post (archived here) on Facebook, also from March 14, 2020. Many of the early postings of the statement on Facebook are from right-leaning pages (archived here) and accounts (archived here).
Carrey has famously been critical of right-wing media and social media rather than national mainstream media as a whole. In an original political cartoon, he equated Fox News to brain cancer. The tweet (archived here) featuring Carrey's thoughts and the cartoon is embedded below:
One of the most corrosive threats to society moving forward is social media and right wing disinformation. There should be giant fines for false info and if they call their content 'hyperbole' in court, they should not be allowed to call it 'news' on tv. pic.twitter.com/GnqTWpd48f
-- Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) January 25, 2021
(Source: Twitter screenshot taken on Wed Aug 11 21:26:15 2021 UTC)
Lead Stories used advanced search on Twitter to check whether Carrey may have tweeted the quote, but there were no results. We also searched for "'close down the national media for 30 days and watch 80%' Jim Carrey" using Google's search engine, with the only reliable link being another debunk of the attribution from Snopes.
