Trump Yet Again Seeks Out the Friendly Confines of Fox News to Answer Questions
american nationalist: Part 2
How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News — and Became Trump'south Heir
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Tucker Carlson had a problem.
Afterwards years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime number fourth dimension. And his new prove, "Tucker Carlson Tonight," had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News's evening lineup simply months after Donald J. Trump's upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.
But equally Mr. Trump thrashed through his beginning months in office, Mr. Carlson found himself with an unexpected programming challenge: Play a joke on was as well pro-Trump. The new president watched his favorite network religiously, and oftentimes tweeted virtually what he saw there, while Trick broadcasts reliably parroted White Firm messaging. No ane was more on message than Sean Hannity, then Flim-flam'due south highest-rated star, who frequently devoted his show to Mr. Trump's daily battles with Washington Democrats and the media.
Newly planted in Pull a fast one on's newly vacated 8 p.1000. time slot — previously held by the disgraced star Neb O'Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, only without imitating Mr. Hannity. He didn't desire to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day, he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would constantly need apologizing for.
The solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces reshaping American conservatism. "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the host and his producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump'due south allure — white panic over the country'due south changing ethnic limerick — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president himself. For years, as his tv set career sputtered, Mr. Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the country's shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made information technology the centerpiece of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
He began seeking 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'due south new line of hijabs, and devoted a segment to "Gypsy" refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Mr. Carlson said had left "streets covered — pardon us now, only it's true — with man carrion." (It was not truthful: Local officials ultimately documented a single instance of a refugee child who had pulled downwardly his pants outside considering he couldn't make it back abode in time.) He cataloged, and magnified, disregarded instances of what he cast as growing bigotry confronting white Americans. Stories virtually the threat of immigration had long been a feature of Fox. But Mr. Carlson dialed upwardly the intensity, expertly weaving tropes borrowed from the far right into a narrative that would come to ascertain "Tucker Carlson This night": falling birthrates amid the native-born, big-city crime, lax immigration policies designed to forcibly alter American social club — all engineered or encouraged past a "ruling course" desperate to censor public discussion of its own failures.
Mr. Carlson'due south darkening arc foreshadowed a transformation beginning to sweep through Fox itself. As Mr. Trump fought to build a border wall and go along Muslims out of the U.s., Fox's journalists and correct-fly commentators would clash repeatedly over what many longtime staff members saw as a creeping invasion of the news divisions past allies and functionaries of the higher-rated, pro-Trump prime-fourth dimension hosts. Mr. Carlson would exist both instigator and beneficiary of Fox'south civil war. He forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, the Murdoch family's heir credible, who would become his nearly public supporter at Fox. And while Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" as a protection of free research and controversial opinions, the reality is less high-minded. From the get-go, Mr. Carlson's on-air provocations have been office of a painstaking, data-driven entrada to build and hold Flim-flam'south audience, co-ordinate to sometime Play tricks executives and employees — an experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Mr. Murdoch's profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.
The network's leadership takes a broader view of Play tricks'due south financial and ratings success. A spokeswoman for the network provided the post-obit statement: "Trick News Media has grown through strategic innovation, redirecting investments in journalism to encompass more than than 50 pct of the budget while expanding our footprint beyond 1 legacy linear network to eight thriving platforms. As a issue, we've doubled our audience, achieved unrivaled results, and accept become the destination that more Democrats and independents choose for their news coverage, while our competitors have lost dramatic levels of viewership. We couldn't be prouder of our unabridged team, whose commitment to excellence in journalism and opinion has led Play a joke on News Media to all-time ratings records and delivered the best in class to our viewers."
Mr. Carlson declined to be interviewed for this article. At Fox, his popularity with viewers has immune him to fend off external critics and shut down those within, from news anchors to inferior employees who objected to his rhetoric. His importance to the Murdochs has grown along with his ratings, giving him unusual power at the network. During the waning months of Mr. Trump'south presidency, Mr. Carlson would harness the tidal wave of white resentment blithe past Mr. Trump to draw the largest audience of whatever testify on television.
Today, Mr. Carlson's influence reaches far across the aqueduct he works for, or the audience that tunes in to his show. Mr. Trump is out of office and banned or suspended from the leading social media platforms. But Mr. Carlson remains, both high priest and champion of Mr. Trump's virtually ardent followers. Each night, Mr. Carlson channels the passions and grievances that have replaced the Reagan-era conservatism he grew up on, from the tyranny of mask mandates to the grave danger posed by disquisitional race theory in schools. He has aggressively dedicated the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January. 6 — an attack that Mr. Carlson, borrowing the former president's "deep state" canards, has portrayed as a false-flag operation masterminded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ambitious Republican lawmakers at present echo his encompass of the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, once relegated to the far-right fringe, that Western elites are importing immigrants to disempower the native-born.
In some respects, Mr. Carlson has taken Trumpism away from Mr. Trump. While the former president has urged his followers to get vaccinated and sought to merits more than credit for his assistants'due south efforts to fight Covid-19, Mr. Carlson has connected to promote doubt about the vaccines' efficacy, even likening mandates to Nazi medical experiments. On the Jan. 6 anniversary, Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, set out to walk back his comments accurately calling the Trump-inspired riot a "violent terrorist attack." He didn't apologize to Mr. Trump. He apologized to Mr. Carlson, in a cringing appearance on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
Trumpism Without Trump
"Tucker Carlson Tonight" was at kickoff only a slight update on the classic cablevision shoutfest. The prove arrived on Play a joke on a few months subsequently Roger Ailes, the network'due south powerful co-founder, was forced out amid a widening sexual harassment scandal. Mr. Ailes had been lukewarm on Mr. Carlson, then paying his dues on the weekend edition of "Fox and Friends." (According to a Trick colleague at the time, Mr. Ailes had once described Mr. Carlson'south hiring at Fox equally "his last chance" in cablevision news.) But the Murdochs liked him, and Rupert Murdoch, who temporarily took the reins subsequently ousting Mr. Ailes, installed Mr. Carlson in Pull a fast one on's 7 p.grand. slot.
In segments dubbed "Tucker Takes On," Mr. Carlson would invite on a liberal foil for combat, an approach Fox executives sometimes referred to equally "Twitter for television." At that place were lighter segments, like "The Friend Zone," in which the host would bring on a Play a joke on colleague or friend for a bit of self-promotion, or "King for a Solar day," in which viewers would exist invited to suggest one thing they would do to fix the country.
Less than two months in, Mr. Murdoch promoted Mr. Carlson again, to the higher-contour nine p.thousand. slot abruptly vacated by Megyn Kelly. To help write scripts, Mr. Carlson hired i of his sometime Daily Caller reporters: Blake Neff, a immature S Dakotan who would later exist let go after CNN outed him for posting racist and sexist jokes online. "Tucker Carlson This night" began to punch up coverage of higher liberals, both a Fox staple and Mr. Neff's specialty at The Caller. Sometimes titled "Campus Craziness," the segments featured conservative professors shunned for criticizing Islam and left-fly professors expressing hatred for white people. 1 episode mocked students in Mississippi who mistook a stray banana peel for a hate crime. Mr. Carlson's ratings shot upwards, and merely a few months after, in April 2017, Mr. Murdoch promoted him to succeed Mr. O'Reilly, long Fox'due south most prominent and popular host. Mr. Carlson's agents immediately began shopping a book, with a cost tag said to exist as high as $15 million.
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To help redesign "Tucker Carlson Tonight" for the eight p.m. 60 minutes, Fox assigned Ron Mitchell, a former O'Reilly producer recently promoted to Fox's executive ranks, where he would supervise "story development" across prime number time. Fox had always excelled not just at attracting more than viewers than its rivals but at getting them to stick around longer, giving an added crash-land to its Nielsen ratings. To maintain its dominance in the mail service-Ailes era, the teams working on Fox's evening lineup began to brand wider use of expensive ratings data known equally "minute-by-minutes." Dissimilar the "quarter-hour" ratings more commonly used in cable newsrooms, which testify how each 15-minute "block" performed, the infinitesimal-past-minutes permit producers to scrutinize an audition'southward real-time ebb and flow. Mr. Carlson, determined to avert his fate at CNN and MSNBC, was among the network'due south well-nigh gorging consumers of minute-by-minutes, according to iii onetime Fox employees.
His new direction — Trumpism without Trump — took shape that summer. The lighter segments faded from view. Notably, Mr. Trump was mentioned less often than on "Hannity," and Mr. Carlson sometimes fifty-fifty criticized the president, particularly when he deviated from campaign promises like building the border wall and avoiding what he had in one case called "stupid" wars. In private, Mr. Carlson mocked the president's habit of calling to head off his on-air attacks. (When Mr. Trump called to pre-empt criticism of one strange-policy move, Mr. Carlson declined the call, co-ordinate to a erstwhile Fox employee who witnessed information technology.)
Most strikingly, "Tucker Carlson Tonight" began devoting more and more than airtime to immigration and to what its host depicted as the looming catastrophe of demographic alter. "He is going to double downwardly on the white nationalism considering the minute-past-minutes bear witness that the audition eats it upward," said another erstwhile Fox employee, who worked oftentimes with Mr. Carlson.
He covered protesters' attempts to pull downwardly Confederate monuments with hyperbolic intensity; one such episode, he told his viewers, marked the start of "the destruction of America'south delicate social fabric." His producers scavenged local news for under-covered items most refugees and migrants, which Mr. Carlson blew upwards into national news. He also began to venture farther afield than other hosts. He mocked Austria as the presently-to-be "caliphate of Westward Arabia." The clearing backfire and migrant crimes in countries like Sweden and Germany became forewarnings of America'due south futurity. "The country'due south in decline," he told viewers in the fall of 2017. He added: "Everyone knows that. It's non racist to notation that."
A Ratings Game
But as America declined on screen, Mr. Carlson ascended backside it.
Fob News was undergoing the most pregnant changes in its history, a shift that would position Mr. Carlson to seize outsize power within the network. The Murdochs were negotiating to sell well-nigh of their television set and studio avails to the Walt Disney Company, a transaction that would as well resolve the family's succession boxing, leaving Lachlan Murdoch as sole heir to the throne. He was widely viewed as having more bourgeois politics than his male parent. In Australia, he had been instrumental in installing a number of difficult-right executives and editors at the family unit's media properties, while overseeing efforts to transform the little-watched cable channel Sky News into a mini-Fox, with a peppery evening lineup. At Fob, he became friendly with Mr. Carlson, who cultivated a perception inside the network that the two men were close.
Mr. Murdoch ran the new Fox enterprises — now a stripped-down company with Fox News at its core — from across the country, in Los Angeles. (Last year, he moved dorsum to Australia.) In mid-2018, he appear the appointment of Suzanne Scott, an Ailes-era network veteran, as the new Play a joke on News primary executive. Though credited with helping revamp the network's post-O'Reilly lineup, Ms. Scott, who would preside over Pull a fast one on expansions into weather, books and other new divisions, seemed disinclined to exert Mr. Ailes'due south tight rein over Fox's talent, co-ordinate to former employees. And where Mr. Ailes had been regarded inside Fox — if not ever outside it — as protective of the news divisions' credibility, Ms. Scott, mindful of the cablevision industry's long-term headwinds, was focused on preserving the network'due south audition. "Suzanne began talking about, 'We take to do more of what we practice best,'" said 1 one-time senior employee.
Under Ms. Scott, Fox's news shows began to more closely mimic its highly rated prime number-time opinion shows in both tone and topic. Guests brought on to analyze the day'due south stories would instead find themselves asked to reply to clips of provocative comments fabricated past Mr. Carlson and other hosts or guests the nighttime before — a backdoor way for Fox to inject prime-time material into the lower-rated dayside shows. In 2018, after a former Hannity producer took over the network's widely read website, FoxNews.com, he assembled a team of reporters called Trick News Flash, who were deployed to write news stories built solely around video clips from prime time. Mr. Carlson'southward drove the most traffic, co-ordinate to a former FoxNews.com employee.
One major strength backside the news-side changes was a former Megyn Kelly producer named Tom Lowell, a Fob vice president who assumed growing authority over the network'due south correspondents and news coverage. He was considered a favorite of the elder Mr. Murdoch, who appreciated his tabloidy approach to news curation. He was less pop among his subordinates, who nicknamed him "the infiltrator," on account of his reputation for stealing credit for ideas, and because of a long-ago incident that became Fox lore as he rose: In his 20s, Mr. Lowell and two friends were arrested after breaking into a liquor store in Florida. (Mr. Lowell received three years' probation, according to public records.) I week, while an executive who typically ran the high-level daily news coming together was on vacation, Mr. Lowell took over the role and never gave it dorsum.
He encouraged shows to focus on the kind of grabby, inflammatory stories that dominated prime number time and collection ratings. As the midterm elections approached and Mr. Trump's unpopularity threatened to sink down-ballot Republicans, Trick began nonstop coverage of a migrant caravan wending its manner through Central America to the U.S. border. Mr. Carlson and other prime number-fourth dimension hosts and guests called the caravan — mostly women and children — an "invasion" dozens of times in the weeks before the election, co-ordinate to tallies by Media Matters and CNN. They continued to do so even afterwards a homo walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue in late Oct and murdered 11 people, leaving behind a trail of social media posts railing against immigrants and Jews and applauding how people were now calling illegal immigrants "invaders."
Shortly after the assail, the longtime anchor Shepard Smith, a beloved effigy in the Fox newsroom, threw a brushback pitch at his own network. "There is no invasion," he told viewers of his afternoon news show. "No one's coming to get you." Whether or non the caravan threatened America, nevertheless, it was a boon to Fox: That Oct, ratings were fifty-fifty college than they had been right earlier the 2022 presidential ballot. Network executives presently began retooling the dayside shows, applying the approach that had worked for Mr. Carlson and his prime number-time colleagues. Mr. Mitchell, now promoted to a loftier-level position running "analytics" beyond Fob, began sitting in on story meetings to vet topics and guests, a role that discomfited some reporters and producers. He handed out color-coded bar charts detailing the minute-past-minute performance of each bear witness. "They're all obsessed with the minute-by-minutes," said a former Fox employee. "Every second that goes on that network now gets scrutinized."
Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell pitched the initiative as "Moneyball" for television: a data-driven, audience-first arroyo to deciding what to cover and how to cover it. But journalists on the daytime lineup discerned a pattern to what the audience didn't like. Segments featuring Play a trick on's own reporters consistently drew lower ratings, specially if they were roofing stories the audience deemed unfavorable to Mr. Trump. So did guests who leaned left, or just staked out independent viewpoints. Mr. Lowell and Mr. Mitchell, for example, urged shows not to book Chris Stirewalt, a respected, down-the-middle political editor and analyst. But immigration was a striking. Coverage of migrant caravans became a Play a trick on mainstay, with 1 correspondent even embedded with refugee groups.
Fox executives wanted to focus on "the grievance, the stuff that would get people boiled up," said one current Fox employee. "They're coming for y'all, the Blacks are coming for you, the Mexicans are coming for y'all."
Dangers Away
In the spring of 2018, Mr. Carlson aired a segment that jolted fifty-fifty his more jaded Play a trick on colleagues. S Africa'due south white farmers were "being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders," he told viewers. The Black-led government "just passed a law assuasive it to seize their farms without whatsoever compensation, based purely on their ethnicity."
Until Mr. Carlson waded in, few Americans were paying attention to "farm murders" in South Africa. In a country of threescore million people, where fierce crime is common but the vast majority of its victims are Black, the police record dozens of murders of whites on farms and other small holdings each year. Just the notion that white farmers were being singled out for assault was largely bars to the far-right web, where writers and commenters warned of a burgeoning "white genocide" — itself a neo-Nazi trope dating back to the end of apartheid.
Then the Murdoch empire stepped in. In the winter of 2018, reporters for a Murdoch-endemic Australian tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, contacted AfriForum, a self-styled ceremonious rights grouping for S Africa's Afrikaner white minority. For months, with little success, the grouping had been circulating widely contested studies claiming to show that white farmers faced a asymmetric risk of murder and brutalization. Later on touring white-owned farms in Due south Africa, the Telegraph team returned with a package of columns and news articles asserting that being a S African farmer was "now the world's most unsafe job" and demanding that they be granted emergency refugee visas. From there, the story would be picked upward by the Fox-inspired nighttime hosts on Heaven News. Within days, Australia's home affairs minister floated the idea of fast-track visas for Southward African farmers.
The thought went nowhere, simply the story soon jumped effectually the world. In a 2022 meeting of Play tricks News executives, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, Mr. Lowell proposed covering farm murders for American audiences, echoing the fevered framing of his Australian colleagues: a land descending into anarchy, an impoverished Blackness majority scheming to kill white farmers and steal their land. Mr. Carlson, information technology turned out, was besides pursuing the story. He had briefly mentioned farm murders in a segment that March, and two months afterwards, when AfriForum officials fabricated a lobbying trip to Washington, an ally put them in touch with him.
"My understanding was, he was interested in the topic already, and someone we had gotten to know over time recommended he speak with united states," said Ernest Roets, AfriForum's deputy main executive, who declined to place the intermediary.
AfriForum formally rejects the far-correct idea of a "white genocide." But when he interviewed Mr. Roets on his show that May, Mr. Carlson bulldozed through the group's careful caveats, describing "in some sense an intentional campaign," supported by the government, "to crush a racial minority within your country."
In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Roets acknowledged that Mr. Carlson had exaggerated.
"It's not my job, as a spokesperson, to tell a journalist how he or she should frame a question," he said. "I would be a bad spokesperson to use what little fourth dimension I have to say, 'Well, permit's frame that question a little differently.'"
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Mr. Carlson's coverage sparked a rare high-level dispute inside the network. During a subsequent meeting of Fox's senior executives, Brian Jones, president of Fox Business concern Network and the highest-ranking Black human being in Fox leadership, explained that almost everything Mr. Carlson was maxim on the air was wrong. Legislators in Due south Africa, where whites withal own the bulk of private farmland, had begun debating a constitutional amendment to allow uncompensated land seizures, but no such mensurate had been passed. Though intended to reverse apartheid-era land dispossession, the proposed amendment did not target farmers on the footing of their race or ethnicity. Nor had the authorities backed a campaign of ethnic violence and murder. Mr. Jones told his fellow executives that Mr. Carlson's coverage had been ripped from far-right sites, including the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. (Mr. Jones, who left the network in 2019, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Mr. Lowell defended the segments, and Mr. Jones was ultimately overruled. A Play a trick on spokeswoman disputed that account, proverb that Mr. Lowell had merely pushed for the story to be investigated to run across if it was accurate. But give-and-take of the high-level editorial dispute soon filtered down through the network. Even among the generally right-of-center rank-and-file, discontent was growing over Fox's nativist tilt and racial scaremongering. Now staff members who had watched the farm-murder story swirl around far-right websites wondered how it had arrived at their network, and why Mr. Lowell and Mr. Carlson had pushed information technology, especially when Fox was and so busy roofing Trump-related breaking news and more conventional controversies.
But Mr. Carlson dug in. He covered South African farm murders and state disputes throughout the spring and summer, over again challenge that officials in that location were seizing land that they hadn't under a constitutional amendment that didn't exist. That Baronial, after an episode of "Tucker Carlson Tonight," President Trump tweeted that his administration would "closely study" the seizure of white-owned land and the "large-scale killing of farmers." Alt-right and neo-Nazi figures in the The states cheered the propaganda coup. Patrick Casey, leader of the grouping Identity Evropa, exulted that Mr. Trump'south declaration could assist bring white nationalist ideas to a mainstream audience.
"Conservatives condign aware of the plight of White South Africans has the potential to have them beyond the current limitations of 'acceptable' conservative immigration debate toward identitarianism," Mr. Casey tweeted.
Strange Bedfellows
Flim-flam journalists soon had some other reason for business organization. Effectually the aforementioned time Mr. Carlson was promoting the notion of a Southward African indigenous cleansing, Flim-flam was lurching through a post-Ailes rebuilding of its human resource system. Lines of authority and ability had e'er been mysterious at Flim-flam, and so when a formal organizational chart appeared on the company's employee portal, some curious employees logged on to see who reported straight to Rupert Murdoch.
Most of Murdoch's subordinates were unsurprising, according to several people who viewed the nautical chart. Only i came every bit a shock: Peter Brimelow, founder of the website VDare.
The British-built-in Mr. Brimelow had known Mr. Murdoch for decades and one time worked as a columnist for MarketWatch, the Murdoch-owned financial news site. But over the years, he had adopted more than pronounced nativist views; VDare, started in 1999, had evolved into a hub of the new, more online-oriented white nationalist motion. Mr. Brimelow in one case described the Obama administration as a "Minority Occupation Authorities" and California as "totally overrun by barrios of illegal immigrants." Shortly later Mr. Trump was elected, he spoke at a conference held by the National Policy Constitute, a latter-day white nationalist group. (Mr. Brimelow sued The Times in 2022 for articles in which either he or VDare was described equally white nationalist; a judge dismissed the case subsequently that twelvemonth. A split up lawsuit brought past VDare is still pending.)
Mr. Brimelow's apparent part at Fox set off a new wave of consternation and gossip. Employees who asked about the relationship were given a variety of explanations. Mr. Brimelow was said to be helping with Mr. Murdoch's memoirs — a project that, as far as most people understood, their boss had abased in the 1990s — or writing speeches, or fastened to some other Murdoch initiative. In short social club, several former Play tricks employees recalled, the organizational chart was taken downwardly entirely.
A Fox spokeswoman said Mr. Brimelow did non currently accept any relationship with the company. Mr. Brimelow declined to comment, writing in an e-mail that The Times could not be trusted, so "you cannot expect any sane person to talk to you."
In Baronial 2018, Mr. Brimelow was spotted at a altogether party for the Trump adviser Larry Kudlow, cartoon an article in The Washington Post and prompting the White House and Mr. Kudlow to altitude themselves from Mr. Brimelow. But at Fox, some took the Brimelow discovery as an indirect explanation for the latitude Fox had extended Mr. Carlson on Southward Africa. If Mr. Murdoch had someone similar Mr. Brimelow working for him, reasoned the former employee, he would have little objection to Mr. Carlson peddling far-correct themes. (By coincidence, the same calendar week Mr. Murdoch'south newspapers had begun their emergency-visa entrada in Australia, VDare published a story imploring Mr. Trump to welcome South African farmers to the United States.)
South Africa was not an aberration. In an echo of how Mr. Murdoch'south media empire had spent decades nurturing right-fly populism throughout the English-speaking globe, Mr. Carlson had begun to fashion his show every bit a broader platform for nationalist ideas. From early on on, he had promoted correct-wing figures from abroad, people who could provide testimony on his themes of immigration and social disuse. Now he was forging links with an increasingly globalized motility of populist activists and politicians — some of them eager for influence in Trump-era Washington.
Among those politicians was Republic of hungary'southward autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, a ascension darling of the international far right. In tardily 2018, the Hungarian embassy hired a lobbyist, William Nixon, with business organisation ties to Mr. Carlson's begetter; within weeks, the lobbyist was in touch with Mr. Carlson most arranging an interview with the Hungarian strange minister, who was planning a trip to Washington. During these talks, co-ordinate to a person with noesis of the conversations, Mr. Carlson mentioned that his caput writer, Mr. Neff, was headed to Hungary the following year to report on how Mr. Orban was "improving the state." (At the time, allies of Mr. Orban, a promoter of what he called "illiberal democracy," had completed a sweeping takeover of the country's news media, and the authorities would soon brainstorm efforts to shut downwards a Budapest university founded past the liberal philanthropist George Soros.) In an email to The Times, Mr. Neff characterized his trip equally a vacation.
Mr. Nixon connected Mr. Neff to the embassy to arrange interviews during the trip, according to the person with knowledge of the conversations. He also brought the Hungarian administrator to Mr. Carlson's Washington office, where the 3 men bonded over fly fishing, a pop pastime in Hungary. Mr. Carlson said he had long been interested in Mr. Orban and would welcome the chance to interview him.
That February, Mr. Carlson hosted the Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, who touted Mr. Orban's hard line against clearing and his efforts to encourage families to have more children. And last summer, Mr. Carlson traveled to Budapest to produce what was in effect an extended infomercial for the Orban regime. In a series of segments and a gentle interview with the prime number minister himself, Mr. Carlson employed a sanitized version of Mr. Orban's Hungary to frame his own arguments about an American civilisation under attack by alien forces.
Where Southward Africa was a warning of the hell that America could get, Hungary was a vision of the paradise that could be had by taking America back. "Yous don't have to sentry your country plummet," Mr. Carlson told viewers. "Y'all don't have to have leaders who detest the population or carve up their ain people against each other."
Going Farther Afield
The day after the 2022 midterms, as darkness fell over Washington's leafy Kent neighborhood, members of a local antifa grouping appeared exterior Mr. Carlson's home to protest his coverage of the migrant caravan. Standing in his driveway, yelling through bullhorns, they chanted, "We know where you lot sleep at night." Mr. Carlson was not at home, but his wife, Susie Andrews, was. Co-ordinate to the Carlsons, someone banged on the door. Panicked, she locked herself in the pantry and dialed 911.
Mr. Carlson had lived in Washington for most of his developed life, and loved it. Two longtime friends said he was deeply shaken past the protests outside his home. "All of a sudden, information technology but became impossible to alive there," Mr. Carlson said in an interview last fall with Dave Rubin, a conservative YouTube personality and occasional invitee on "Tucker Carlson Tonight." He added, "I felt like we were actually function of the city and and then, next thing y'all know, people are showing upwards at the house." He worried that "y'all're going to wind up shooting somebody." Within a year, he would flee Washington entirely, seeking asylum far beyond the Acela corridor.
In March 2019, Mr. Carlson set out to buy a battered town garage in Bryant Pond, Maine, where his family had owned a vacation getaway for decades. In a letter of the alphabet to town officials, he pledged that Fob would install a state-of-the-art studio in that location. Mr. Carlson had never been guarded about his home in Bryant Pond, and often told interviewers about his love of Maine living. But when a local newspaper, The Sun Journal, published news of the proposed buy, he lashed out like a man under siege. "All information technology does is injure me," he told the paper's reporter, Steve Collins, explaining that Fox would never agree to leave $one meg worth of equipment in an isolated rural location if everyone knew about information technology. (Mr. Carlson would raise the stakes when The Times later on assigned a freelancer to write about his life in Bryant Pond, accusing the paper of seeking to endanger his wife and children. A Maine-based freelance photographer, whom Mr. Carlson named on air, found his own door banged on by strangers later on night.)
In the cease, Mr. Carlson proceeded with his plans, and by the following bound, The Sun Periodical reported that his new studio was complete. He put his Washington business firm upwardly for sale and began living in Maine much of the year, taping "Tucker Carlson This night" from Bryant Pond. (When not in Maine, Mr. Carlson ordinarily broadcasts from Florida, where he has a 2d dwelling in the resort boondocks of Boca Grande.)
A different kind of threat was emerging inside Fob itself. In March 2019, the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters surfaced one-time recordings of Mr. Carlson defending statutory rape and calling Iraqis "semiliterate primitive monkeys," comments that had nonetheless more advertisers fleeing and Play a trick on colleagues fuming, peculiarly some younger employees. That aforementioned month, the Fox opinion host Jeanine Pirro questioned on air whether Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and Somali-built-in old refugee, might exist more loyal to her Muslim religion than to the Constitution. The slur prompted a young Muslim employee named Hufsa Kamal, who worked on Flim-flam's flagship news show, "Special Report With Bret Baier," to chastise Ms. Pirro on Twitter — an extraordinary breach of the network's hermetic culture. Not long after, as Ms. Kamal endured a stream of online abuse and threats from Fox fans, a producer in Fox's Los Angeles bureau named Dan Gallo wrote to the visitor'southward height human being resources executives.
"When Flim-flam personalities brand these sorts of statements, it damages my credibility as a Play a joke on journalist & my ability to effectively cover stories," wrote Mr. Gallo, who provided copies of his emails to The Times. He argued that Mr. Carlson and Ms. Pirro were creating an unsafe workplace for employees similar Ms. Kamal, and asked that Pull a fast one on accept action. "If an employee said those things in the workplace, specially with Muslim colleagues present, I think they would exist disciplined," Mr. Gallo wrote. (While Fox had issued a argument condemning Ms. Pirro's remarks, she had not apologized.) Before sending his complaint, Mr. Gallo showed a copy to Ms. Kamal to brand certain she was comfy with it.
In a subsequent telephone call, the executives, Kevin Lord and Nicolle Campa, seemed receptive, Mr. Gallo said in a statement to The Times. They thanked him for his alphabetic character and promised to relay it to Ms. Scott and Jay Wallace, Fob News's president, so that they could sympathise the impact the hosts were having on the network's journalists. Mr. Gallo assumed the complaint would otherwise remain confidential, equally with other human resource matters.
A month afterward, Mr. Carlson landed in Los Angeles for a weeklong West Coast stint. Minutes later on arriving in the bureau, he tracked down Mr. Gallo, who was sitting in an office talking to ii colleagues. "Are you Dan Gallo?" he interrupted. When Mr. Gallo tried to innovate himself, an indignant Mr. Carlson but handed him a blue notecard with his cellphone number. The adjacent time Mr. Gallo had a trouble with his show, Mr. Carlson said, he should "do the honorable thing" and call. Mr. Gallo offered to talk and then and at that place, he said, but Mr. Carlson wasn't interested. "I'one thousand busy," the host said, and walked off.
That night, Mr. Gallo wrote over again to the human resources executives, asking who had told Mr. Carlson about his complaint. They promised to talk to Mr. Carlson. But pressed on the leak in a subsequent telephone call, Mr. Lord refused to expect into the thing. He blamed workplace gossip, and insinuated that Mr. Gallo himself was responsible for the leak. "That was insulting," Mr. Gallo said. "I stuck to the proper channels and had moved on." He left Fob that summertime, and now works for MSNBC. (The author of this commodity is an MSNBC contributor.)
Far from being chastened, Mr. Carlson seemed to be testing his boundaries. In August 2019, days after a 21-year-onetime white man killed 22 people at an El Paso Walmart to protestation what he called the "Hispanic invasion of Texas," Mr. Carlson declared on the air that white supremacy was largely a "hoax." Even more advertisers fled; Mr. Carlson embarked on what Play a joke on described equally a preplanned vacation. While he was gone, a Fox producer named Cristina Corbin tweeted an indirect rejoinder to the prime-time star. "White supremacy is real, as evidenced by fact," Ms. Corbin wrote. "Claims that it is a 'hoax' do not correspond my views."
She had not mentioned Trick'southward star by proper noun, simply Mr. Carlson appeared to catch wind of her tweet almost immediately. A few hours later, while still on vacation, he called Ms. Corbin at work from a blocked number, then berated her for airing her disagreement publicly. "Close your oral cavity," he yelled, according to a former Fox executive briefed on the episode. Ms. Corbin did non respond to an email seeking comment for this article; Play a trick on declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements pertaining to human resource matters.
When Ms. Corbin reported the incident to Fox management, Mr. Carlson denied making such a telephone call, according to the former executive. He was soon dorsum to explaining to his viewers how liberals and Big Tech wanted them to "just shut up."
The Backlash Pays
It was a frequent refrain on "Tucker Carlson Tonight"— and a calculated one. Co-ordinate to former Play a trick on employees, Mr. Carlson and his team had learned to work the calls for boycotts and cancellation into their programming playbook. Mr. Carlson would grab 3rd track on race or immigration, then harvest the inevitable backlash, returning the next evening to roast his critics for trying to suppress an obvious truth. The feedback loop didn't only drive upwardly ratings. It boosted the audition's loyalty to Fox, while encouraging audiences to identify with Mr. Carlson himself, now playing victim to the same forces he was warning them about. (Liberal-leaning outlets and Twitter influencers also capitalized on Mr. Carlson's provocations, using clips from "Tucker Carlson This night" to attract and provoke his haters rather than his fans.)
In early June 2020, Mr. Carlson told his audition that the Black Lives Thing protests were "definitely non about Black lives" and to "remember that when they come up for y'all." The next evening, every bit Fox's public relations squad insisted Mr. Carlson'southward comment was being mischaracterized, Mr. Carlson leaned in. "The mob came for us — irony of ironies," he told Play a trick on viewers. "They spent the last 24 hours trying to strength the show off the air for good. They won't succeed in that, thankfully. Nosotros work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they're not intimidated."
Off-camera, Mr. Carlson could be less defiant. In a chat that jump with Eric Owens, i of his former employees at The Daily Caller, he worried that the controversy over his show had made it hard for his children to get jobs and internships; he worried that his younger children wouldn't get into higher. "It'southward not right for this to affect my family, and literally affect my children's future," Mr. Carlson said, according to Mr. Owens.
But it'south less clear whether the attacks significantly affected Play a trick on's bottom line: To compensate for the lost advertising, Pull a fast one on turned "Tucker Carlson Tonight" into a promotional engine for the network itself. It replaced the fleeing sponsors with a torrent of in-house promos, leveraging Mr. Carlson's popularity to drive viewers to other, more advertiser-friendly offerings. By early 2019, roughly a fifth of all advertising "impressions" on the bear witness were from in-house ads, according to data from the analytics company iSpot.tv. That summer, as Pull a fast one on fended off criticism of Mr. Carlson's "hoax" comments, the proportion climbed to more than than a third. (A Play tricks spokeswoman said the actual proportions were lower, but declined to provide specific figures.) "Play tricks is basically an enormous loyalty brand," said Jason Damata, the chief executive officer of Fabric Media, a media consultancy. "He'south the claw."
Other advertisement slots were taken past straight-to-consumer brands that either didn't care about Mr. Carlson's bad publicity or saw that they could use his intensity to sell their products. Beginning in January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose primary executive, Mike Lindell, is a major promoter of Mr. Trump'south stolen-election lie, began ambulation more than $1 million worth of ads on "Tucker Carlson This night" each calendar month. Fox appeared to be using MyPillow to absorber Mr. Carlson: As other advertising dried up, the company'southward ads spiked. (All told, through Dec 2021, Mr. Lindell had bought advertising that would accept toll $91 meg at publicized rates; discounts probably made that sum lower.)
Baddest advertisers would never render to the show in force. But cheers in role to the large audiences he could provide for those advertisers who remained, and the premium prices Fob could charge them, Mr. Carlson's advertizing revenue began to recover. Every twelvemonth since 2018, "Tucker Carlson Tonight" has brought more annual ad revenue to Trick than any other testify, co-ordinate to estimates by iSpot. Last May, after promoting the white supremacist "replacement" theory, Mr. Carlson had one-half as many advertisers equally in Dec 2022 only brought in nearly twice as much money.
Equally "Tucker Carlson This evening" became more toxic to advertisers, information technology too began featuring fewer guests who disagreed with the host, and more guests who simply echoed or amplified Mr. Carlson'south own message. Information technology wasn't but that liberals didn't want to debate him, though some at present refused to appear on the testify, as Mr. Carlson complained during a Play tricks appearance last summertime; Fox was learning that its audience didn't necessarily similar hearing from the other side. "From my discussions with Pull a fast one on News bookers, my takeaway is that they've made the judgment that they just don't do debate segments anymore," said Richard Goodstein, a Democratic lobbyist and campaign adviser who appeared regularly on Mr. Carlson's show until the summer of 2020. Beyond much of the Fox lineup, former employees said, producers were relying more than and more on panels of pro-Trump conservatives competing to see who could denounce Democrats more fervently — a ratings gambit one former Play a trick on employee chosen "rage aggrandizement." (One exception, perhaps, is "The Five," a panel evidence featuring 4 conservative co-hosts and one rotating co-host from the left, which has beaten Mr. Carlson in total viewers in some contempo months.)
And as advertisers fled, Mr. Carlson'due south opening monologue grew. Where once he spoke for only a few minutes, sometimes in a neutral just-request-questions mode, he now often opened the bear witness with a lengthy stemwinder, addressing his audience every bit "yous" and the objects of his fury every bit a shadowy "they." Ratings information showed that the monologues were a hit with viewers, according to 1 former and one electric current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson regularly spoke straight to the camera for more than than quarter of the hourlong testify. Instead of less Tucker, the audience got more.
His critics at Trick found themselves further marginalized: After an on-air feud with Mr. Carlson over the legality of Mr. Trump's efforts to force per unit area Ukrainian officials, Shepard Smith was reportedly warned confronting criticizing his fellow host — something the network denies — and he departed Fox in October 2019. Mr. Carlson'south ratings grew, buoyed past the increasingly heated and apocalyptic presidential entrada. One dark in June 2020, after yet another commercial-to-commercial attack on Blackness Lives Matter protesters, Mr. Carlson addressed the matter direct. Ratings were more than than simply ammunition in the cablevision-news wars, Mr. Carlson explained. They were proof that his viewers were not alone, proof that they were correct. "Last night, we did something we don't do very ofttimes: We spent the unabridged first block of the bear witness on a single topic," he said. More people had watched the previous nighttime'due south prove, he observed, than whatsoever other hour of prime-time television that evening — more than the old evening news broadcasts, more than any sitcoms or sports events. "Millions and millions of Americans agree with yous," he said. "You are not crazy. Your views are non evil."
That month, another Fob employee complained to human resources that Mr. Carlson's on-air statements contradicted Mr. Murdoch's public pledge to "back up our Blackness colleagues" in the wake of George Floyd's killing. In response, an executive cited the company's demand to allow "various voices and perspectives," according to a person familiar with the substitution. At the end of the month, when the Nielsen figures trickled in, Fox sent out a triumphant news release: Mr. Carlson had posted the highest quarterly ratings of whatever cable news testify in history — breaking Mr. Hannity'south one-time record and helping make Fox the about-watched channel on all of bones cable.
An Upside-Down Nation
In the cease, it was Play tricks's own political unit of measurement, a bastion of traditional news-gathering, that brought the network's increasingly wobbly balancing human activity to an finish. Just earlier midnight on Election Day, hours ahead of other networks and news consortiums, Fox appear that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the swing state of Arizona. Mr. Trump instantly declared the result a "fraud," but the post-obit Saturday, equally late votes trickled in, Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania, catastrophe the presidential race.
Mr. Trump's defeat was the ultimate glitch in Play a joke on'due south Trump narrative, one that couldn't be so easily spun or papered over by its prime-time hosts. Despondent Trump supporters began to expect elsewhere for news, encouraged by anti-Fox tweets from Mr. Trump himself. In early December, the upstart conservative network Newsmax, which had positioned itself every bit even more devotedly pro-Trump, scored its first ratings win over Fox. Information technology was a minor cleft in Fox's cable dominance — fewer than 30,000 viewers in one audition segment on a single Dec nighttime in the 7 p.m. hour — but it sent shudders through the Fox executive suites. The network might shrug off the complaints of a few advertisers; losing audience to a right-leaning rival was another affair. That calendar month, according to one former Trick executive, Rupert Murdoch delivered a message to the network's chief executive, Ms. Scott: Clean business firm. (A Play a trick on spokeswoman disputed this description.)
The purge would non come until early January, as CNN and MSNBC overtook Play a trick on, the cablevision-news ratings leader for two decades, and as Washington reeled from the tearing, Trump-inspired try to overturn Mr. Biden'southward victory. In the intervening weeks, Mr. Carlson and other Fox prime-time hosts would pump out a steady stream of attacks on the election results, often drawing on claims of voter fraud from Mr. Trump and his new legal squad, led by Rudolph West. Giuliani. Fox's prime-time guns also aimed inward: When a Fox White House correspondent and occasional Carlson invitee, Kristin Fisher, told viewers that much of one rambling Giuliani presentation "was simply non true or has already been thrown out in court," Mr. Carlson went on the air to assail "credentialed reporters, some of whom nosotros know and like," who were refusing "even to acknowledge" the already discredited claims. He had non mentioned Ms. Fisher by name, but she was warned by superiors to continue her head downwardly, co-ordinate to two former employees. She did not reappear on air for several days, and her appearances declined significantly in subsequent weeks. (Ms. Fisher afterwards left for CNN.) Around the network, supervisors repeated an Orwellian mantra: "Respect the audience."
Image
Much as Mr. Carlson'due south vast cable audience had grown to encompass the white nationalist fringe, it at present drew in some of the hundreds who would go along to attack the Capitol. At least eight people now facing criminal charges stemming from the insurrection commented on Mr. Carlson's official Facebook page in the preceding months, co-ordinate to an analysis of since-deleted Facebook accounts conducted for The Times by CounterAction, a security firm. They included Graydon Young and Connie Meggs, members of the Oath Keepers militia organization who would be indicted on federal conspiracy charges. Some other Carlson fan was Tammy Bronsburg, who on Election Day posted "We ARE TAKING OUR COUNTRY Back." Two months subsequently, she donned a Trump flag as a greatcoat and joined the crowd breaking into the Capitol. (Mr. Young pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the authorities against the Adjuration Keepers; Ms. Meggs and Ms. Bronsburg are fighting the charges against them. Their lawyers did not comment on the Facebook posts.) Later that day, as the Capitol lay stained with claret and broken glass, the Proud Boys posted a defiant message of justification on the Parler social media platform, borrowing a meme from Mr. Carlson's segments on Black Lives Matter. The lesson of the civil rights protests, Mr. Carlson had claimed, was that "violence works."
Soon after the Capitol riot, Play a trick on replaced its 7 p.m. host — Martha MacCallum, a news anchor and role of the political reporting squad — with another hr of right-wing opinion programming. Mr. Stirewalt, the political editor, who had vanished from the air after defending the Arizona call, was fired; his boss, Play tricks's Washington bureau master, Pecker Sammon, retired. More than a dozen reporters for Trick'southward digital arm were also laid off, a culling that followed pre-election layoffs in the Brain Room, the in-house research and fact-checking division. Publicly, Fox portrayed these changes as a restructuring, but as with the Moneyball initiative, their impact was felt chiefly in the news ranks, now an expensive and increasingly distracting legacy of the Ailes era.
Trumpism without Trump had begun as a programming strategy. Now, with Mr. Trump gone from the White House and cut off from Twitter and Facebook, information technology has become a reality. Mr. Carlson, more successfully than any other figure on the correct, has filled the vacuum, picking up the banner of Mr. Trump'southward motility and the followers who insist he was cheated of victory. Terminal year, according to The Times's assay, nearly half of Mr. Carlson's shows — more than 100 episodes — included segments playing down the Capitol riot, lurching into always more fantastical terrain. Much equally he in one case recast the country'south racial bureaucracy to brand white Americans an oppressed course, Mr. Carlson has inverted the story of Jan. vi into a modernistic-day Lost Cause. On "Tucker Carlson This evening," the rioters were not aggressors; they were victims. Terminal June, he floated a conspiracy theory that the riot was an inside task, claiming that an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a government court filing was "almost certainly working for the F.B.I." In fact, it was Sharon Caldwell, the married woman of an insurrectionist with ties to the Oath Keepers; a few months after, Mr. Carlson brought Ms. Caldwell onto the testify, now casting her and her hubby as the victims of overzealous prosecutors.
This past autumn, Mr. Carlson and his team distilled the show's Jan. half dozen fantasia into "Patriot Purge," a three-role "documentary" for the Fob Nation streaming aqueduct. Afterward a trailer aired in tardily October, two longtime Fox contributors quit in protest. Mainstream media outlets and fact-checking sites inevitably eviscerated Mr. Carlson's work for its factual errors and dubious assertions, but that was beside the point. Afterwards starting the year with the lowest ratings in cable news, Fox ended 2022 back on top. And Mr. Carlson's inverted, invented narrative of the Jan. 6 insurrection has become a new Republican orthodoxy: This Feb, members of the Republican National Committee canonical a resolution calling investigations into the attack a "persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse," censuring two Republicans who sit down on a congressional panel scrutinizing the riot. "Propaganda tends to bewilder people, to confuse them when they first hear it," Mr. Carlson observed terminal autumn, in a monologue accusing liberals and mainstream outlets of themselves misleading the public almost Covid-19, January. half dozen and the 2022 elections. "It is then completely and obviously untrue," he continued. "'What is this?' you think. And still for that very reason, because it's so ridiculous, so cool, propaganda tends to be effective."
Reporting was contributed by Larry Buchanan , Weiyi Cai , Ben Decker , Alan Feuer , Barbara Harvey , Kenneth P. Vogel , and Karen Yourish . Jack Begg and Julie Tate contributed research.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-fox-news.html
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