The question, What happened to Tucker Carlson? is worth answering. If we can figure out how an intelligent writer and conservative can go from writing National Magazine Award–nominated articles and being hailed by some of the best editors in the business, to shouting about immigrants on Fox News, perhaps we can understand what is happening to this country, or at least to journalism, in 2018.
TUCKER MCNEAR SWANSON CARLSON was always going to be a journalist, if only through inertia and nepotism; the talent was a bonus. Carlson is the son of Dick Carlson, a media executive, who used to direct the Voice of America and is a former CEO of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tucker was born in 1969, the older of two boys. Their mother, Lisa McNear Carlson, left the family when he was six. “Totally bizarre situation—which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all,” Carlson told The New Yorker in 2017 (Lenz 1).
Carlson's paternal grandparents were Richard Boynton and Dorothy Anderson, teenagers who placed his [Tucker’s] father at The Home for Little Wanderers orphanage where he was fostered by Carl Moberger, a Malden, near Boston, tannery worker of Swedish descent, and his wife Mainer Florence Moberger, and adopted at the age of two-years-old by upper-middle-class New Englanders, the Carlsons, an executive at the Winslow Brothers & Smith Tannery of Norwood (the oldest tannery in America) and his wife. …
In 1976, [Tucker] Carlson's parents divorced after the nine-year marriage reportedly "turned sour". Carlson's father was granted custody of Tucker and his brother. Carlson's mother left the family when he was six, wanting to pursue a "bohemian" lifestyle.
When Carlson was in first grade, his father moved Tucker and his brother to the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, and raised them there. Carlson attended La Jolla Country Day School and grew up in a home overlooking the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. His father owned property in Nevada, Vermont, and islands in Maine and Nova Scotia. In 1984, his father unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Republican Mayor Roger Hedgecock in the San Diego mayor race (Wikipedia 2-3).
When Tucker was 10, Dick remarried to Patricia Swanson of the Swanson frozen dinner fortune; her uncle was Senator J. William Fulbright. Carlson and his brother Buckley went to the Rhode Island private school St. George’s and, later, Tucker attended Trinity College, where, as he told the CJR in an interview, he spent his days mostly drunk. He graduated in 1992 and married his high school sweetheart, Susan Anderson.
Carlson applied to the CIA, but his application was denied, so he turned to journalism. “You should consider journalism,” his father told him. “They’ll take anybody.”
And they did.
Carlson began working for Policy Review as a fact-checker. “I ended up working for this magazine because the standards are so low,” he explains.
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“I have all kinds of problems with authority and being told what to do,” he says. “I was not suited for that kind of work.”
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... Carlson insists he … was motivated only by the needs of a growing family. He maintains that if someone handed him $5 million he wouldn’t have gotten out of bed. (And he’d be easy to believe, if he wasn’t, in fact, worth over $8 million, and hadn’t himself stood to inherit enough to keep him in a rotating series of beds until retirement.)
But it’s the story he’s sticking to. He had to do what he had to do. He didn’t have a choice. He has kids. DC has terrible public schools. His hands were tied. So, in addition to his staff positions, he took freelance jobs. He didn’t want to disappoint his family.
“I think this is true of almost everybody unless you happen to inherit a bunch of dough at a young age.” Carlson sounds cavalier as he says this, like the plight of sending kids to a private school in DC is the most relatable thing in history. …
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… Carlson’s story is the story of the working man. He is, in this way, a Trumpish avatar—roguish, rich, independent, and confusing as hell. Despite his pedigree, or more likely because of it, Carlson has managed to become a vox populi of the deplorables. His show attracts an audience of 2.7 million people who see him as a voice of independent Americans. His book Ship of Fools, which rails against the liberal media establishment, is due out in October. The man's voice and his power are only growing (Lenz 2-3).
His Republican father, former journalist Dick Carlson, now 59 and an Internet entrepreneur, was ambassador to the Seychelles, islands off the coast of Africa, during the Bush Administration. Tucker and younger brother Buckley, now 29 and a Washington policy analyst, were raised in La Jolla, Calif., by their father and stepmother, Patricia, 55, after their mother left home when Tucker was 6. Though a lackluster student, Carlson was an avid reader who had devoured War and Peace by age 10 and would become a boarding school debate team star at St. George’s School in Rhode Island, where he met and wooed the headmaster’s daughter Susie Andrews, now 31. “She was the cutest 10th grader in America,” he says. Says she: “There was a bounce in his walk. He was in his khaki pants and ribbon belt and I thought, even then, he seemed so optimistic and positive. (Dougherty 1).
His boarding school career was, by his own telling and everyone else’s, unremarkable but for one feature: He discovered debate and put it before everything else. Near the end of his time at the school, Carlson supposedly challenged any member of the faculty to debate him; no one accepted. Carlson then shipped off to Connecticut’s Trinity College, where he claims to have spent most of his time drunk. But this was the first PC era on campus, and, though an unremarkable student, Carlson was something of a conservative star. He thrilled at pissing off the hippies and lefties protesting on campus. When it was time to list his clubs and organizations in the school’s yearbook, Carlson cited membership in the nonexistent Dan White Society—a tribute to the murderer of Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician of the 1970s—and the Jesse Helms Foundation (which does exist). “His personality was not similar to what it is now; it was exactly the same,” his college roommate (and future Daily Caller co-founder) Neil Patel said in 2017. Already apparent then were the twin pillars of Carlson’s career in conservative media. On the one hand, there is conservative pedigree: the bow tie, the well-heeled family, the debates. On the other, a fratty, trolly, attention-seeking side (Shephard 10).
… In 1991, six months before graduating from Trinity, he asked his former headmaster for Susie’s hand in marriage. “All very 19th-century,” he says, “but a good thing to do.” Today [2000] the couple live with their children—Lillie, 5, Buckley, 3, and Hopie, 1—in the 1906 farmhouse they renovated in Alexandria, Va., a short drive from Carlson’s office at the Standard, where he has worked since 1995. “He’s so imaginative with them,” says Susie about her husband, who reads to the children constantly and, each July 4th, teaches them the meaning of the Constitution by reading the Bill of Rights and setting off a firecracker as he recites each liberty. “It’s good not to take our freedoms for granted,” says Carlson, who further instills civic pride in his kids by flying an American flag in the front yard every day of the year. “Patriotism is so uncool, but they don’t know that” (Dougherty 2).
In February 2009, when he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Tucker Carlson was in the midst of an identity crisis. Five years earlier, he had been a victim of what was arguably the first viral takedown of the internet era. Jon Stewart, then at the height of his Daily Show fame, appeared on CNN’s Crossfire, told the hosts they were ruining the country, and singled out Carlson in particular as a “dick.” Crossfire limped along for three more months before being canceled. Carlson then spent the next four years in the wilderness, appearing on Dancing with the Stars and hosting Tucker, which was canceled for low ratings in early 2008, on MSNBC, still a year or two away from deciding it would be the liberal cable news network. In 2003, a fresh-faced 34-year-old Carlson had released a memoir, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites, which cataloged and celebrated his meteoric rise through the burgeoning world of cable news. Now, however, Carlson was on the verge of flaming out.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but I lived here in the 1990s and I saw conservatives create many of their own media organizations,” Carlson said in 2009, at Washington’s Omni Shoreham Hotel. “I saw many of those organizations prosper, and I saw some of them fail. And here’s the difference: The ones that failed refused to put accuracy first. This is the hard truth that conservatives need to deal with. I’m as conservative as any person in this room—I’m literally in the process of stockpiling weapons and food and moving to Idaho, so I am not in any way going to take a second seat to anyone in this room ideologically.” …
“If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail,” Carlson said, his voice building to crescendo. “The New York Times is a liberal paper … but it’s also a paper that cares about whether they spell people’s names right; it’s a paper that cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.”
The audience booed. Then the heckling started. Carlson attempted to defend himself. “I’m merely saying that at the core of their news gathering is gathering news!” he yelped at one inaudible audience member. “Why aren’t there outlets that don’t just comment on the news, but dig it up and make it?”
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… his journey to the top of conservative media began with that CPAC speech. There has always been a nastiness and racial grievance at the core of Carlson, but, for much of his early career, he also sought a degree of respectability. At the time, there was still a somewhat respectable conservative media in existence. Carlson's wobbly ascent in right-wing media eerily reflects the gradual stripping away of that respectability, as well as its increasing radicalization. "You could ague that Tucker Carlson's career has been a Tour de France of conservative media. He has literally hit all the stations of the cross," former conservative blogger Matthew Sheffield told me. "But all that's changed is the object of his cruelty. Whereas before he was more of an Atlas Shrugged kind of guy--screw the poor. Now he's decided to change the focus to let's keep out these goddamned minorities."
A year after his CPAC speech, Carlson would take a stab at creating the type of hard news–focused outlet he described. When he launched the Daily Caller in 2010, he vowed that it would "primarily be a news site" with a straightforward approach to the news; "Find out what's happening and tell you about it. We plan to be accurate, both in the facts we assert and in the conclusions we imply."
There wasn’t an audience. Within a few months, it was publishing fake news and outrage-driven commentary. The transformation of The Daily Caller is the Rosetta Stone moment of Carlson’s career, a period during which he learned his lesson. He never sought respectability again.
Carlson’s journalism career began on the respectable side of conservative journalism. He started out working for Policy Review, the journal then housed inside the Heritage Foundation, where he wrote sober, plodding pieces about conservative policy issues: the decline of Black public schools, the benefits of a private police force, and “HOW TO CLOSE DOWN A CRACK HOUSE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD.”
After a brief sojourn as an op-ed writer at the Little Rock–based Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Carlson joined the nascent Weekly Standard, the Murdoch-owned opinion journal whose early staff also included David Brooks. Carlson told The Washington Post in 1999 that he “begged” friends and colleagues to persuade Weekly Standard editor William Kristol to hire him. He was also in contention for a position at the Clinton conspiracy-obsessed American Spectator, but he worried he would “be written off as a wing nut” if he accepted a job there.
His career quickly took off. Much of Carlson’s Weekly Standard work is witty but doctrinaire—gossipy dispatches from Clinton’s scandal-plagued second term and Newt Gingrich’s sputtering speakership. …
… interspersed are the pieces that made Carlson’s reputation and turned him, practically overnight, into a star. His 1996 profile of future Crossfire co-host James Carville is the gold standard: a sly and devastating hit piece. Dubbed a “populist plutocrat,” Carlson’s Carville is, above all else, a hypocrite and a poseur: a craven check-casher who cares primarily about lining his own pockets and sucking down expensive wines. And yet, Carville is also oddly sympathetic—one senses Carlson recognizes a fellow traveler, another rakish opportunist who just happens to be playing for the other side.
In these pieces, we see the nucleus of Carlson’s later persona: He cares not one iota for public policy; what gets his blood up is hypocrisy, particularly when it comes from women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. He continued writing for The Weekly Standard but became one of the most sought-after long-form magazine writers in the country, publishing pieces for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and, later, The New Republic.
In 1999, he profiled George W. Bush for Tina Brown’s Talk magazine. Bush was running as “a compassionate conservative,” a Christian of deep faith, and a moral leader who could lift the country out of the debauched Clinton years. Carlson’s profile was glowing—mostly. But he also caught Bush’s naughty, frat boy side: He quotes the Texas governor saying “fuck,” over and over again, something Bush’s communications director, Karen Hughes, went to great lengths to deny. More chillingly, Carlson also noted Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker, a recently executed death row inmate in Texas: “‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’”
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Whether he was top talent or not, Carlson’s magazine writing career was over almost as soon as it began. While he was rising through the ranks in Washington, befriending liberal and conservative editors along the way, he was also becoming a television star.
As a writer, Carlson had a gift for irony and for bringing out stark, but often submerged, truths about his subjects. He was a bomb-thrower—he clearly idolized both Christopher Hitchens and Hunter S. Thompson—but the smug 15-year-old debater and “Dan White Society” member was also cloaked. Carlson relished the revealing of unsavory details about his subjects, but his brash and glib side was largely smothered by the nature of the assignments. Television brought out the worst in Carlson—and it made him an even bigger star.
Carlson described his break into TV as a lucky one: “If O.J. Simpson hadn’t murdered his wife, I probably wouldn’t be working in television,” he wrote. CBS needed pundits to cover the O.J. trial, and Carlson answered the call; he quickly became a cable news regular, before hosting his own debate show on CNN with liberal Bill Press, beginning in 2000. That show was a disaster—Carlson was still figuring out what worked on TV—and it was quickly canceled. But the bow-tied Carlson had found a home at CNN, which quickly slotted him in as the fratty, well-heeled Republican on Crossfire, where he would shout at liberals Paul Begala and James Carville every afternoon. Carlson, as ever, understood the assignment: He was there to bark and bicker and to gleefully represent Team Red (Shephard 8-15).
Works cited:
Dougherty, Steve. “Meet Mister Right.” People, November 6, 2000. Net. https://people.com/archive/meet-mister-right-vol-54-no-19/
Lenz, Lyz. “The Mystery of Tucker Carlson.” Columbia Journalism Review, September 5, 2018. Net. https://www.cjr.org/the_profile/tucker-carlson.php
Shephard, Alex. “How Tucker Carlson Lost it.” New Republic, September 16, 2021. Net https://newrepublic.com/article/163567/tucker-carlson-profile-lost-mind
“Tucker Carlson.” Wikipedia. Net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_Carlson
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