It started with mere exaggeration about issues that genuinely, legitimately, do matter to Americans. Immigration, for instance. In 2017 in Pennsylvania, a Roma refugee child couldn’t make it to a bathroom on time, pulled down his pants, and defecated outside. By the time Carlson injected the story into the national consciousness, “gypsies” had overrun the town and left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human faeces”.
Viewers reacted with anger and fear. And soon Carlson’s show grew so big it competed less against other news programmes than the internet itself. But rage is a market with inflation. By the end of his tenure at Fox, Carlson railed against candy: “Woke M&Ms have returned. The green M&M got her boots back, but apparently is now a lesbian maybe?”
For a time, a conscientious viewer could overlook the widgets tumbling from Carlson’s outrage assembly line because they mattered so little. “You know the official story about pandas. They’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they’re almost extinct,” he told viewers in 2018. “But like a lot of what we hear that’s a lie.”
Then, in 2020, the country suffered a presidential election so fractious it tore at the fabric of American society. The author Mark Bowden and I wrote a book about the effort to overturn that election, and much of our attention went to the literal machinery of democracy: the vote tabulators made by Dominion and Smartmatic. As we pieced together accounts from county-level election officials — themselves almost all conservative Republicans — reality diverged ever-further from the version put forward by Carlson and his colleagues on Fox News. And we wondered: how are they getting away with this?
Carlson had retooled the factory, and instead of cranking out horny pandas and woke M&Ms, the show offered viewers conspiracies about matters of life and actual death. The apparatus of democracy. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The war in Ukraine.
Segments from Tucker Carlson Tonight started appearing in Russia’s internal propaganda. And suddenly he wasn’t getting away with it. Dominion weighed in with a gargantuan defamation lawsuit against Fox News, a suit so strong that Fox scrambled to apologise, repeatedly and in prime time. Then, thanks to the suit, the private text messages of Fox’s biggest stars went public, revealing that they didn’t believe the lies from Trump’s team. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote of Trump’s lawyer, to a colleague. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” Carlson didn’t believe any of it. But he had picked a side.
Uglier, if less consequential, revelations followed. The day after the January 6 attacks, for instance, Carlson had sent the following text to a producer:
“A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”
All of it — the Dominion reporting, the hypocrisy about Trump, the racist messages — led Fox News in April to pull their highest-rated host from the air. In Tucker, Carlson’s biographer describes Carlson’s downfall not as the consequence of his own actions, but instead, naturally, as the result of a conspiracy with foreboding consequences for the reader: “What’s most stunning was the brazenness. A major network had caved to political and regulatory pressures, and the leftists behind it didn’t even feel the need to pretend otherwise. This is the way healthy societies die.”
Carlson remains under contract with Fox — still receiving a paycheck according to the new book — although he has created a showdown with the network since then by broadcasting on Twitter (since renamed “X”). The videos portray Carlson in exile, and there’s an element of truth to it. He’s still fabulously wealthy and famous, but he no longer sits on the Fox News throne. Instead, he broadcasts from a less polished set, where he uses his hand to scroll his own teleprompter, and his shows feel like an attempt to grab a piece of a younger, online zeitgeist. Take the two-and-a-half-hour interview with “alpha male” influencer Andrew Tate, which Carlson began by claiming public schools in America are removing urinals from boys’ bathrooms because “masculine qualities are oppressive” and boys should “sit down when you pee, like a good little girl”. Carlson used a different set, for that episode, as Tate is under house arrest in Romania, awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking.
It is impossible to say where Carlson will go next. Maybe he’ll find a larger, younger audience. Maybe, like Howard Stern, the former broadcast radio shock jock who turned to satellite radio, he’ll shift to a narrower but even more lucrative format. Only one option seems unimaginable: that he could simply fade away.
At the end of the new biography, Carlson muses on his future, and makes what he intends to be a jab at television. One last conspiratorial offering for you. But for years he was the leading voice on the format, so instead it comes across as unintended confession: “You can tell when someone’s lying to you or when someone’s shading the truth or trying to spin you,” he says. “And there’s a lot of artifice in television.”
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