Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss.
Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.
The answer became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.
When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.
“We’re good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the restaurant.
In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.
His encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons labs.
Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.
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… To a degree not broadly appreciated outside Fox, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is the apex of a programming and editorial strategy that transformed the network during the Trump era, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists. Like the Republican Party itself, Fox has sought to wring rising returns out of a slowly declining audience: the older white conservatives who make up Mr. Trump’s base and much of Fox’s core viewership. To minimize content that might tempt them to change the channel, Fox News has sidelined Trump-averse or left-leaning contributors. It has lost some of its most respected news journalists, most recently Chris Wallace, the longtime host of Fox’s flagship Sunday show. During the same period, according to former employees and journalists there, Fox has leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence, often plucked from local news sites and turbocharged by the channel’s vast digital news operation. Network executives ordered up such coverage so relentlessly during the Trump years that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”
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Mr. Carlson has led the network’s on-air transformation, becoming Fox’s most influential employee. Outside Fox, Mr. Carlson is bandied about as a potential candidate for president. Inside the network, he answers solely to the Murdochs themselves. With seeming impunity, Mr. Carlson has used his broadcast to attack Fox’s own news coverage, helping drive some journalists off the air and others, like the veteran Fox anchor Shepard Smith, to leave the network entirely. In Australia, the editors of some Murdoch-owned newspapers watch Mr. Carlson’s show religiously, believing it provides clues to Mr. Murdoch’s own views. According to former senior Fox employees, Mr. Carlson boasts of rarely speaking with Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, but talking or texting regularly with Mr. Murdoch. And in an extraordinary departure from the old Fox code, Mr. Carlson is exempt from the network’s fearsome media relations department, which under Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder, served to both defend the channel’s image and keep its talent in line.
But Fox Nation is also a kind of programming cocoon. Its lineup has included shows about patriotism and national parks, the nostalgic series “Who Can Forget?” and a category called, simply, “Conspiracies.” In September, it acquired “Cops,” the police reality show canceled by its previous owner in the wake of the Floyd protests. There is almost no traditional news at all on Fox Nation, but lots of Mr. Carlson — a thrice-weekly talk show called “Tucker Carlson Today” and goading documentaries like “Patriot Purge,” which presented the Jan. 6 insurrection as a false-flag operation by shadowy actors determined to persecute innocent Americans; two longtime Fox contributors quit in protest.
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Almost from the beginning of his career, he has been marching away from the puckish libertarianism of his young adulthood. Increasingly sympathetic to the nativist currents raging through American politics after the Sept. 11 attacks, and twice cast from the heights of cable news stardom, Mr. Carlson ultimately turned on the old conservative intelligentsia, his hometown and many of his friends. His fall and rise trace the transformation of American conservatism itself. When Mr. Trump ran for president and won, thrusting anti-immigration fervor to the heart of American politics, Mr. Carlson finally found his moment. At Fox, he found his platform.
Mr. Carlson declined to be interviewed for this article. Virtually everyone who did speak asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly about Mr. Carlson or his employer; the host is vengeful toward critics, and officials or media figures Mr. Carlson attacks on his show are sometimes threatened with violence. On his show Thursday night, shortly before The Times received Fox’s statement praising the program, Mr. Carlson sought to weave this article into his nightly narrative. He called journalists at the newspaper “obedient little establishment defenders” and asked: “Why do they keep calling us racist? Well, to make us shut up, obviously.”
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Accuracy isn’t the point on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” On the air, Mr. Carlson piles up narrative-confirming falsehoods and misleading statements so rapidly — about George Floyd’s death, while supremacists who took part in the Jan. 6 riot, falling testosterone levels in men, Covid vaccines, the Texas power grid and more — that The Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has made a sideline of cataloging them. Though Mr. Carlson claims his show to be “the sworn enemy of lying,” Fox’s lawyers acknowledged in 2020, in a lawsuit accusing the host of slander, that “spirited debate on talk-show programs does not lend itself well to statements of actual fact.”
But if Mr. Carlson has not always been truthful, he has been remarkably consistent. Almost from the beginning, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has presented a dominant narrative, recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste. The ruling class uses fentanyl and other opioids to addict and kill legacy Americans, anti-white racism to cast them as bigots, feminism to degrade their self-esteem, immigration to erode their political power. Republican elites, however improbably, help to import the voters Democrats require at the ballot box. The United States, Mr. Carlson tells his viewers, is “ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”
He leaves little doubt who these mercenaries are. Among the most frequent recurring characters on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” are Black politicians like the Democratic congresswomen Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar and Vice President Kamala Harris, whom Mr. Carlson has portrayed, against the available evidence, as a kind of shadow president. He regularly disparages Black women as stupid or undeserving of their positions. “No one outside of her own neighborhood had ever heard of Kamala Harris before she showed up as Willie Brown’s girlfriend,” Mr. Carlson said last November, referring to Ms. Harris’s long-ago relationship with the California politician. “Then a few years later, she became Montel Williams’s girlfriend. Interesting.” When President Biden nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Mr. Carlson demanded that the White House release her law school admissions test scores to prove she was qualified.
Seemingly every social ill is laid at the feet of immigrants and refugees — not just working-class unemployment, but rising home prices, out-of-wedlock births among native-born Americans, even the supposedly sorry state of his favorite Beltway fishing spots. With pastoral care, Mr. Carlson reassures his viewers. “It’s OK for you to say: ‘What is this?’ and ‘Maybe I don’t want to live in a country that looks nothing like the country I grew up in,’” Mr. Carlson told a guest in 2017. “Is that bigoted?”
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… economists broadly reject Mr. Carlson’s central argument that immigration to the United States “drives down wages for low-skilled workers nationwide,” as he said in a 2019 segment. As one review of the relevant literature put it, “Decades of research have provided little support for the claim that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers.” Immigrants compete for jobs but also help generate new ones, not only by raising demand for goods and services but also by helping fill out workplaces as they expand to hire native-born workers with different skills. While some studies have found that earlier waves of low-skill immigration may have had short-term impacts on the wages of one relatively small group — high school dropouts — other studies have found “small to zero effects,” …
But as televised theater, the formula works.
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Mr. Carlson was a heavy drinker until his 30s, something he has attributed in part to his early childhood. But by his own account, his mother’s abandonment also provided him with a kind of pre-emptive defense against the attacks that have rained down on his Fox show. “Criticism from people who hate me doesn’t really mean anything to me,” Mr. Carlson told Megyn Kelly, the former Fox anchor, on her podcast last fall. He went on to say: “I’m not giving those people emotional control over me. I’ve been through that. I lived through that as a child.” One lesson from his youth, Mr. Carlson told one interviewer, was that “you should only care about the opinions of people who care about you” (Confessore “How” 1-8).
A New York Times examination of Mr. Carlson’s career, including interviews with dozens of friends and former colleagues, and an analysis of more than 1,100 episodes of his Fox program, shows how he has grown increasingly sympathetic to the nativist currents coursing through U.S. politics, and how intertwined his rise has been with the transformations of his network and of American conservatism.
Here are some key takeaways from “American Nationalist,” The Times’s three-part series on Mr. Carlson.
Years of talking points from the far-right fringe
Last spring, Mr. Carlson caused an uproar when he promoted on air the notion of the “great replacement” — a racist conspiracy theory, once relegated to the far-right fringe, that Western elites are importing “obedient” immigrant voters to disempower the native-born. …
But this was hardly something new for Mr. Carlson. In more than 400 episodes, the Times analysis found, he has amplified the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration.
Mr. Carlson’s producers often trawl the web for supporting material. …
He put Trumpism over Trump
In the White House, Mr. Trump had a symbiotic relationship with Fox: watching, tweeting, talking frequently to the network’s hosts. But that presented Mr. Carlson with a programming problem as his new show ascended to Fox’s marquee 8 p.m. time slot: He wanted to reach the Trump base, he told friends and co-workers, but without being beholden to the mercurial president. The solution: embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump.
The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure —white panic over the country’s changing ethnic coomposition— while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president. Mr. Carlson sometimes even criticized the president, and in private, he mocked Mr. Trump’s habit of phoning to head off on-air attacks.
He sought out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird” and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture. He inveighed against Macy’s, for instance, for introducing a line of hijabs, likening it to promoting genital mutilation.
As Tucker goes, so goes Fox
Mr. Carlson forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, heir apparent of the Fox empire, and cultivated a perception within the network that the two men were close. As his show became the highest-rated cable news program in prime time, Fox looked to its success as a model for a broader transformation.
Inside the network, journalists and commentators clashed over what many saw as a creeping invasion of the news division by allies of the higher-rated, pro-Trump prime-time hosts.
While Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives haveoften couched their defense of“Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have long been something else: part of a painstaking, data-driven experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Fox’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.
According to three former Fox employees, Mr. Carlson was among the network’s most avid consumers of what are known as minute-by-minutes — ratings data on an audience’s real-time ebb and flow. “He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up,” said a former employee who worked frequently with Mr. Carlson.
Network executives soon began applying the approach to the daytime news shows. They pitched it as “Moneyball” for television: an audience-first approach to deciding what to cover and how to cover it.
Journalists on Fox’s daytime shows discerned a pattern to what the audience didn’t like: segments featuring Fox’s own reporters, stories deemed unfavorable to Mr. Trump, left-leaning or independent guests. Immigration, on the other hand, was a hit.
Network executives ordered up so much coverage of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”
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Going after his critics
Mr. Carlson’s popularity among viewers has allowed him to fend off critics outside Fox and shut down those within, from news anchors to junior employees who have objected to his rhetoric.
After an on-air feud with Mr. Carlson in 2019 over the impeachment inquiry and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials, Shepard Smith was reportedly warned against criticizing his fellow host. He departed Fox that October.
After a Fox producer, Dan Gallo, expressed concerns to human resources executives about recordings of Mr. Carlson defending statutory rape and calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” and on-air comments by Jeanine Pirro questioning a Muslim congresswoman’s loyalty to the Constitution, Mr. Carlson learned about his complaints and confronted him face to face in Los Angeles, demanding that Mr. Gallo “do the honorable thing” and call him if he had a disagreement. Mr. Gallo offered to talk then and there, but Mr. Carlson wasn’t interested. “I’m busy,” the host said, and walked off.
Days after a mass shooting in El Paso by a white man protesting what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Mr. Carlson declared that white supremacy was largely a “hoax.” A young Fox reporter, Cristina Corbin, tweeted, without mentioning Mr. Carlson: “White supremacy is real, as evidenced by fact. Claims that it is a ‘hoax’ do not represent my views.” The host called Ms. Corbin and yelled at her to “shut your mouth,” according to a former Fox executive briefed on the episode. When asked about the incident by Fox management, Mr. Carlson denied making the call.
His playbook sent sponsors fleeing, yet nearly doubled ad dollars
Here is the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” playbook: Go straight for the third rail, be it race, immigration or another hot-button issue; harvest the inevitable backlash; return the next evening to skewer critics for how they responded. Then, do it all again. This feedback loop drove up ratings and boosted loyalty to Fox and Mr. Carlson.
What it did not do was endear Mr. Carlson to advertisers. As blue-chip sponsors fled, Fox filled the space with in-house promos — using Mr. Carlson’s popularity to push other Fox shows — and direct-to-consumer brands like MyPillow, whose chief executive is a major promoter of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie.
Last May, after promoting the white supremacist “replacement” theory, Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018. But he brought in almost twice as much money (Confessore “What” 1-4).
Fox News host Tucker Carlson says he has not read and does not plan to read the wide-ranging examination of his career arc, editorial strategy and prominence at the network published by The New York Times over the weekend.
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On Sunday, Carlson told Axios he has not read any of the Times piece and does not plan to. He also denied its reporting relative to his obsession over ratings.
“I’ve never read the ratings a single day in my life. I don’t even know how. Ask anyone at Fox,” Carlson told Axios. “Most of the big positions I’ve taken in the past five years — against the neocons, the vax and the war [in Ukraine] — have been very unpopular with our audience at first.”
Earlier on Sunday, Carlson posted a picture of himself on Twitter holding the front page of Sunday’s Times with a smile.
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Carlson’s show airs weeknights and last week he alluded to the forthcoming Times opus, calling Times journalists “obedient little establishment defenders,” who “will say anything to please their bosses, they’re suck-ups, brown-nosers, lickspittles, not people you’d want to have dinner with.”
“If you don’t obey them, they denounce you as a racist,” Carlson said. “Why do they do this? They do it because it works. But here’s the thing. It can only work if you play along with it. And we don’t plan to” (Mastrangello 1-2).
Works cited:
Confessore, Nicholas. “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear To Conquer Cable.” New York Times, April 30, 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-gop-republican-party.html
Confessore, Nicholas. “What To Know about Tucker Carlson’s Rise.” New York Times, April 30, 2022. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/business/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news-takeaways.html
Mastrangello, Dominick. “Tucker Carlson Brushes off 20,000-Word NY Times Story Dubbing Him ‘American Nationalist’.” The Hill, May 2, 2022. Net.
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