This is your brain on Tucker Carlson
Night after night on Fox, Tucker Carlson weaponizes his viewers’ fears and grievances to create what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news. It is also, by some measures, the most successful.
With singular influence — reaching far beyond Fox and the viewers who tune in to his show — Carlson has filled the vacuum left by Donald Trump, championing the former president’s most ardent followers and some of their most extreme views. As fervently as he has raced to the defense of the Jan. 6 rioters, so has he sown doubt and suspicion around immigrants, Black Lives Matter protesters or COVID-19 vaccines.
A New York Times examination of 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’ three-part series on Carlson.
Years of talking points from the far-right fringe
Last spring, 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. The Anti-Defamation League called for his firing, noting that such thinking had helped fuel a string of terrorist attacks.
But this was hardly something new for 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.
Carlson’s producers often trawl the web for supporting material. In the show’s early years, clips would sometimes be sent to the network’s fact-checkers, who would occasionally discover that a story had actually originated further afield, on a racist or neo-Nazi site like Stormfront.
In a statement, Justin Wells, a senior executive producer overseeing Carlson’s show, defended the host’s rhetoric and choice of topics: “Tucker Carlson programming embraces diversity of thought and presents various points of view in an industry where contrarian thought and the search for truth are often ignored.”
He put Trumpism over Trump
In the White House, Trump had a symbiotic relationship with Fox: watching, tweeting, talking frequently to the network’s hosts. But that presented 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 Trump.
The show would grasp the emotional core of Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president. Carlson sometimes even criticized the president, and in private, he mocked 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
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 Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, 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, 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,” a former employee who worked frequently with Carlson said.
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