Tucker Carlson will take over for Megyn Kelly on Fox News next week, the network announced Thursday [January 5, 2017].
Carlson, a conservative commentator and founder of The Daily Caller web site, is well-known to Fox fans. His two-month-old show "Tucker Carlson Tonight," an out-of-the-box ratings success at 7 p.m., will move to the 9 p.m. hour.
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Ever since the show debuted on November 14, Carlson has shown a knack for selecting topics of interest to conservative viewers; hosting fiery debates with liberals; and criticizing Fox's rivals in the mainstream media.
At the end of every show, Carlson says his broadcast is "the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink."
Many of his segments and fights have gone viral. A sampling of recent headlines from the show: "How liberals are slowly killing colleges," "Journalists exposed by WikiLeaks to cover Trump White House," and "Tucker vs. student who says Trump shouldn't be given chance."
[Roger] Murdoch said in a statement that "Tucker has taken cable news by storm with his spirited interviews and consistently strong performance."
Donald Trump's election has contributed to a ratings surge at Fox News, and Carlson has been able to capitalize on it. At 7 p.m., he has averaged about 2.8 million viewers, and more than 500,000 in the advertiser-friendly 25- to 54-year-old demographic.
Unlike Fox's 8 p.m. host Bill O'Reilly and 10 p.m. host Sean Hannity, Carlson does not have a friendly relationship with Trump dating back decades. He said in a January 2016 column that "Trump might not be my first choice for president."
But he is open-minded about Trump and doesn't have the antagonistic relationship that Kelly had with him.
Online comments and emails to Fox showed that some Fox loyalists turned against Kelly after Trump publicly ridiculed her in late 2015 and early 2016. Kelly's ratings remained high, but the anger was palpable (Stelter 1).
He may have played it safe on Dancing with the Stars, going with a classic “cha-cha” routine, but when he’s behind the desk with a camera in his face, he goes much harder, saying things that have white supremacists cheering him on.
“How precisely is diversity our strength? Since you’ve made this our new national model, please be specific as you explain it,” said Carlson. “Can you think, for example, if other institutions, such as marriage or military units, in which the less people have in common, the more cohesive they are. Do you get along better with your neighbors or coworkers if you can’t understand each other? Or share no common values? Please be honest as you answer this question.”
Among the 91% white audience tuning in to Fox, a few stand out—as a Vox explainer first noted. First, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke. He’s tweeted his support for Carlson numerous times. Duke’s called Carlson a “hero” for exposing white ethnic cleansing, and he even has a nickname for his favorite host: Tucker ‘Knows’ Carlson.
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With viewership like that, it’s not surprising that the president also tunes in. A source close to Trump said, “They aren’t personally close. He’s not getting strategic advice from him directly the way he might from a Hannity. But they do chat on occasion, mostly Trump complimenting a segment here and there. He definitely likes him, and…it’s not unusual for him to be exposed to issues through Tucker’s show and others.”
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In 2016 Carlson wrote, “About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair, I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day saying, “It’s true you have better hair than I do, but I get more pussy than you do.’” The future president hung up.
Carlson has since argued this assumption.
Interviewer:
“How many women have you had sex with in your life?”
Carlson:
“A lot. Hundreds… It was a short window, but I packed it full…
Carpet bombed” (Levine 1).
He’s one of Donald Trump’s most vociferous backers. But Tucker Carlson has told multiple people that he voted for pop star Kanye West last year instead.
Shortly after the presidential election, the Fox News host started telling some program guests that he had cast his ballot for West, according to two people familiar with those conversations. Given Carlson’s fierce on-air commentary in favor of Trump, the guests were left wondering if Carlson was serious or merely joking.
“It’s his way of saying that he’s not just another Trumpette at Fox News like Sean Hannity,” one of the sources said, referring to Carlson’s fellow prime time opinion host and reputed internal rival.
Other Carlson associates said the affinity between the two men — one a longtime conservative commentator who once wore a bowtie and moved seamlessly within liberal political and media circles, the other an eccentric music celebrity whose tumultuous relationship with Kim Kardashian recently ended in divorce — is real.
Prior to the election, Carlson said he would vote for West, according to a third person who knows Carlson. “He and Kanye get along. They both regularly find themselves in the cross hairs. They’re both pro-life,” this associate said.
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An outspoken populist whose eponymous program has become the most popular show on cable news, Carlson won credit on the left for helping persuade Trump in early 2020 to not attack Iran. He’s also been critical of some of Trump’s policies, such as criminal justice reform. But his remarks on racial issues and immigration have earned him widespread condemnation by liberals who accuse Carlson of spreading toxic, divisive ideas (Lippman 1-2).
Fox News host Tucker Carlson called former President Donald Trump, then a real-estate mogul toying with a presidential bid, the "most repulsive person on the planet" and "so horrible" in a 1999 post on the website Slate.
Carlson, then an early-career conservative writer and commentator, made the judgment in an exchange with fellow Slate blogger, Evan Smith, who first labeled Trump a "repulsive" character.
"I'd love to add something even meaner to your description of Donald Trump — he's the sort of person I want to keep kicking once he's down–but I don't think I can," Carlson wrote in his exchange with Smith. "You've said it all: He is the single most repulsive person on the planet."
But Carlson acknowledged that Trump, who was considering a 2000 run as a Reform Party candidate, was more "interesting" than many others in politics.
"That said, I still plan to write about him some time. I don't think I'll be able to help it. Horrible as he is (or perhaps because he is so horrible), Trump is interesting, or at least more so than most candidates," he wrote, adding that the Trump and the Reform Party lacked any political "ideology" and were "just a bunch of wackos with a Web site and federal matching funds."
The Washington Post resurfaced Carlson's comments in an investigative piece published Wednesday exploring his history of pushing white grievance politics and opposing efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism.
Carlson, who later became a key Trump ally, couldn't have predicted in the 90s that his career as a right-wing TV personality would thrive under a Trump presidency. His Fox News primetime show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," debuted shortly after Trump's election in 2016 and has become the most-watched cable news show in the country.
A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment, but pointed Insider to a 2016 Politico column Carlson wrote in which he calls Trump "imperfect" and stops short of endorsing him for the GOP presidential nomination, while simultaneously lavishing praise on his populist politics (Relman 1-2).
Suddenly you’re digging him. At least a little bit. I know, I’ve seen the tweets, read the commentary, heard the chatter, detected the barely suppressed cheer: Hurrah for Tucker Carlson. If only we had more brave, principled Republicans like him.
Right out of the gate, he protested President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian military commander, noting that it didn’t square with the president’s determination not to get bogged down in the Middle East and warning of the possibility and horror of full-blown war. Your pulse quickened. You perked up.
He sounded that same alarm on his next show and the show after that. Every night at 8 p.m., he worried about the bellicose itch of our leaders. When all around him on Fox News were playing their usual roles (indeed, his usual role) as masseurs for the president’s tender ego, he administered slaps, hard ones, the kind that leave angry red handprints. Ouch — and don’t stop.
You rejoiced. It’s one thing when Democrats challenge what looks like a rush to war by a Republican president. It’s another when typically fawning members of his own party do.
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Carlson to the rescue!
Oh, please.
… In lieu of a normally functioning White House communications department or a press secretary who holds actual press briefings (what a thought!), we have “Fox & Friends” in the morning and Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s shows in the evening.
They don’t chronicle this presidency. They shape it, not just in terms of the volume of their applause for Trump, who craves the loudest possible clapping, but in terms of actual interactions. Carlson — like Hannity and another Fox fixture, Lou Dobbs — has in fact advised him behind the scenes.
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Carlson, mind you, has not disavowed Trump. In fact he performed semantic acrobatics to denounce America’s military maneuvers against Iran without precisely blaming Trump. Those slaps I mentioned landed more forcefully on the administration in general than on the man-child at its apex, who is, in Carlson’s tortured rendition, a gullible marionette, his strings pulled by inveterate, habitual warmongers. If these profiteering elites would just let Trump be Trump and train his wrath on Mexicans instead of Iranians, a great presidency would get its groove back.
During his Tuesday show, Carlson performed political jujitsu and held two of the president’s principal Democratic adversaries responsible for exacerbated tensions with Iran. Referring to the Washington establishment and singling out Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, he said, “These are people who have been basically advocating for a kind of war against Iran for an awfully long time.”
“It’s infuriating,” he added. “It’s because of Schumer and Pelosi and people like them that we got into Iraq in the first place.”
Come again? A Republican president, George W. Bush, urged and oversaw the invasion of Iraq, and while Schumer authorized it, Pelosi voted against it, as did many more Democrats than Republicans.
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Carlson remains true to Carlson: selective with facts, slanted with truths and — this is the most important part — committed to his vision of America as a land imperiled by nefarious Democrats and the dark-skinned invaders they would open the gates to if not for sentries like him and Trump.
… in the mind-set of Carlson and many of his fans on the far right, energy spent on missions in another hemisphere is energy not spent on our southern border. …
… Carlson asked his audience, “Why are we continuing to ignore the decline of our own country in favor of jumping into another quagmire?”
Carlson is defined not by a bold willingness to check Trump’s excesses or ugliest impulses but by his indulgence — no, his fervent encouragement — of those impulses as they pertain to racism and immigration. …
Carlson repeatedly uses variations of the word “invasion” to characterize migrants from Central America. He insists that “white supremacy is a fiction, a hoax. He has used language that buys into and promotes “replacement theory” — a far-right fixation on the idea that declining birthrates among whites will cause a nonwhite takeover — and recently castigated immigrants for litter along the Potomac River (Bruni “Tucker” 1-3).
… He’s the new Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Josh Hawley. Not Rick Scott. Certainly not Ted Cruz.
Those other men are vying merely for Trump’s political mantle, with the occasional side trip to Cancún.
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Moving to fill the empty space created by Trump’s ejection from the White House, his banishment from social media and his petulant quasi-hibernation, Carlson is triggering the libs like Trump triggered the libs. He’s animating the pundits like Trump animated the pundits.
Case in point: Carlson’s endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.
“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart,” Carlson railed. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child abuse.”
What lunatic hyperbole. What ludicrous histrionics. And what timing. Carlson shares Trump’s knack for that — for figuring out precisely when, for maximum effect, to pour salt into a civic wound.
His free-the-children bunk played on the weariness of more than a year of coronavirus vigilance. It came just as Americans were puzzling over the need for masks once they’re vaccinated or when they’re outdoors. It was juiced by arguments about what degree of caution remains necessary and what’s just muscle memory or virtue signaling.
And it was helpfully succinct and tidily packaged so that other commentators could tee off on it. Carlson understands what Trump always has and what every practiced provocateur does: You don’t just give your detractors agita. You give them material. That way, everything you say has a lengthy half-life and durable shelf life.
Several shows on MSNBC covered Carlson’s rant. Several shows on CNN, too. “The View” waded in. So did Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. When you’re the subject of late-night comedians’ monologues, you’ve really made it.
Just two and a half weeks earlier, another of Carlson’s soliloquies — in which he peddled the far-right paranoia about a Democratic Party scheme to have dark-skinned invaders from developing countries supplant white Christian Americans — became its own news story, making him more of an actor in our national drama than a chronicler of it.
It was hardly his first lament about immigration, and he had dabbled in the “great replacement theory” before. But this time around it was more helpfully succinct, more tidily packaged, more honed. “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” he fumed. “I have less political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate.”
He made voters sound like Mazdas and America like a car lot.
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To give him attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich. In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host — ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow — and it meant that he was both capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.
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… we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.
Trump’s dominance was so profound from early 2016 through early 2021 that there’s now something of an obsession with naming his successor, even though it’s not at all clear that he’s willing to be succeeded. All the men I mentioned earlier covet that crown. But not all of them fully understand that Trump’s métier wasn’t politics. It was performance.
Carlson gets that. If advancing arguments was his exclusive or primary goal, he wouldn’t allow for so much confusion regarding the flavor of his invective. But debates about whether he’s genuinely making points or disingenuously pressing buttons might well be a ratings boon. To keep people guessing is to keep people tuned in.
I’m not saying that he’s Trump’s doppelgänger. He’s neither orange nor ostentatious enough. He can be as verbally dexterous as Trump is oratorically incontinent, as brimming with information as Trump is barren of it. Carlson reminds you of a prep school debate team captain all puffed up at his lectern. Trump reminds you of a puffy reality-show ham — what he was before he rode that escalator downward, a harbinger of the country’s trajectory under him.
But both barge through the contradictions of being both populists and plutocrats. Both pretend to be bad boys while living like good old boys. Both market bullying as bravery.
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Then came television and then high-decibel duels on television and then Trump, the shark to Carlson’s pilot fish. Carlson, who flattered him, got the time slot on Fox News that had belonged to Megyn Kelly, who feuded with Trump.
And now? The pilot fish has grown his own mighty jaws, and the ocean’s only a little bit safer (Bruni “New” 1-4).
Works cited:
Bruni, Frank. “The New Trump? Easy. It’s Tucker.” New York Times, May 1, 2021. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/opinion/sunday/tucker-carlson-trump.html
Bruni, Frank. “Tucker Carlson Is Not Your New Best Friend.” New York Times, January 11, 2020. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/opinion/sunday/tucker-carlson.html
Levine, Samm. “WHO IS: Tucker Carlson?” nowthisnews.com, October 24, 2019. Net. https://nowthisnews.com/politics/who-is-tucker-carlson
Lippman, Daniel. “Tucker Carlson Told Associates He Voted for Kanye, Not Trump.” Politico, July 1, 2021. Net. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/01/tucker-carlson-kanye-west-2020-vote-497654
Relman, Eliza. “Tucker Carlson Called Trump 'the Single Most Repulsive Person on the Planet' and a 'Wacko' in 1999.” Business Insider, July 14, 2021. Net. https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-called-trump-the-most-repulsive-person-on-the-planet-in-1999-2021-7
Stelter, Brian. “Fox News Picks Tucker Carlson To Take Over for Megyn Kelly.” CNN, January 5, 2017. Net. https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/05/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news-megyn-kelly/index.html
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