It was not immediately apparent that host Tucker Carlson would prove triumphant at the start of his on-air feud with then-colleague Shepard Smith in September 2019. Smith had been present for the launch of Fox News and rose to chief news anchor and managing editor of the breaking news desk over his more than 20 years at the network. An award-winning journalist with a facts-first approach, Smith gave Fox executives a much-needed example to point to while making the case that the network was more than Donald Trump’s propaganda arm.
But just a few weeks later, Smith abruptly resigned. Having found no support from the network’s brass following Carlson’s sarcastic mockery, Smith stunned his colleagues by announcing his immediate departure at the end of his daily broadcast.
It was a sign of things to come.
Eighteen months later, no one doubts Tucker Carlson’s preeminent position at Fox.
Carlson hosts the network’s highest-rated show in its premiere time slot. But his role at Fox is much greater than that of his predecessor Bill O’Reilly, long described as the King of Cable News. As Carlson’s bigotry triggered a series of scandals, his patrons, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, effectively responded by not only defending but further raising his profile.
Carlson’s face became a ubiquitous presence on the network following the 2020 election. Fox began frequently injecting Carlson’s commentary into programs up and down the network lineup; since November, the network has aired clips from his shows in at least 134 weekday segments on other programs, and he’s made a dozen guest appearances. And earlier this year, he became the linchpin of Fox Nation, Fox’s streaming service. His new show airs three times a week, and the week it premiered, Fox gave him more than nine and a half hours of promotion on other programs.
Carlson's incendiary rhetoric triggered an advertiser exodus from his program years ago; blue-chip companies had largely abandoned Tucker Carlson Tonight by late 2018. But he is now so thoroughly integrated into Fox’s programming and strategy that advertisers on the network’s other programs can’t hope to fully separate their brands from his.
And that’s very dangerous for them. As he rose to the top of Fox, Carlson became a frequent mainstreamer of blood-soaked white supremacist conspiracy theories; the nation’s most prominent skeptic of the coronavirus vaccine; a shaper of Republican politics who aimed to maximize the party’s cruelty toward immigrants, Black people, and the trans community; and a prominent voice fanning the flames of violent right-wing extremism.
Carlson is now the face of Fox, inseparable from the rest of the network by its design.
Unrestrained extremism with a huge national audience
At the height of his fame as a co-host of CNN’s Crossfire in 2003, Carlson proclaimed that it was “hard to imagine” him ever taking a job at Fox, calling its commentators “a mean, sick group of people.” But Jon Stewart’s decimation of Carlson and his show the following year sent the program into a tailspin from which it never recovered, and Carlson’s subsequent turns as host at PBS and MSNBC were short-lived. By 2009, reduced to a national punchline, Carlson signed on as a Fox contributor.
At the time, Carlson said that he would do “whatever they want me to do” at the network. And over the next seven years, he did just that, embodying the network’s typical mix of bigotry and propaganda while serving as a political talking head, guest-hosting for the network’s A-listers, and warming the seats of the Curvy Couch as a co-host of Fox & Friends’ weekend broadcasts.
When Carlson wasn’t at the network’s studios, he kept busy doing conspiracy-minded guest spots on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, engaging in casually racist and misogynistic commentary in regular appearances on the shock-jock Bubba the Love Sponge Show radio show, and building up The Daily Caller, a right-wing digital outlet he co-founded in 2010 that developed a thorny habit of employing and publishing white nationalists.
But in September 2016, Carlson got his big break when a rare slot in what had been the most consistent evening lineup in cable news opened up. The Murdochs had forced out Fox founder Roger Ailes over the summer as his long history as a sexual predator became public. When longtime Fox host Greta Van Susteren tried to leverage the situation to get a raise, she enraged Rupert Murdoch, who promptly fired her, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported in his book, Hoax. “Within hours,” Stelter added, “Rupert reached out to weekend host Tucker Carlson about taking over her time slot after the election.”
Carlson had been pulled from the C-list to take a prominent role in a network that was retooling for Donald Trump’s presidency. His show launched in Van Susteren’s 7 p.m. time slot that November, but he benefited from continued and unprecedented churn at Fox in the early months of the Trump administration. In January 2017, after Megyn Kelly jumped to NBC, he took over her superior 9 p.m. time slot. When O’Reilly’s history of sexual harassment settlements became public and Fox defenestrated him that April, Carlson slid into the premier hour in cable news.
A full accounting of Carlson’s program, which has been bigoted, reckless, and apocalyptic even by the network’s standard, would fill volumes. But here are four key aspects.
A white supremacist favorite
Carlson regularly promotes white supremacist themes, talking points, and figures. It’s not just Media Matters saying that: White supremacists themselves regularly champion his program. They say outright that he is mainstreaming their ideas -- against racial diversity and immigration and in favor of white anxiety -- to his massive audience.
You used to have to go to the likes of the neo-Nazi website Stormfront to hear that global elites are directing an immigrant “invasion” from underdeveloped countries that is making the U.S. “poorer and dirtier” because they want to “replace the current electorate” and enact “demographic change.” Now you can turn on your television and get all of that from watching the most popular program on cable news.
An unhinged Covid-19 conspiracy theorist
In March 2020, as the coronavirus spread across the U.S., Carlson drew praise for successfully convincing Trump to take the virus seriously, however briefly. But the Fox host soon pivoted to dangerously reckless coverage of the virus.
Since then, Carlson has promoted untested anti-malarial drugs; prematurely declared the worst of the pandemic was over; championed protests against coronavirus mitigation efforts; baselessly suggested the U.S. death toll may have been exaggerated; mocked warnings of future casualties; denounced public health measures and the scientists who supported them; and helped turn face masks into a culture war flashpoint. He’s turned over his platform to a series of coronavirus charlatans and crackpots, including notorious COVID-19 crank Alex Berenson, whom he’s hosted 33 times since March 2020.
In recent days, Carlson has become the nation’s most prominent skeptic of the coronavirus vaccines. He has spent months denouncing the effort to get the public vaccinated and insinuating that the drugs may not be safe or effective and that scientists who say otherwise are “lying” (he now falsely claims that he “never for a minute doubted” that the vaccines work and “never questioned” them). At a time when Republicans are disproportionately likely to say they won’t get vaccinated, Carlson’s rhetoric can have a deadly impact.
A GOP radicalizer
When Carlson speaks, Republican politicians listen. And that means that his demagoguery can spill over into federal policy. Carlson’s influence was particularly apparent under Trump’s administration, as the Fox-obsessed president responded to his program by changing U.S. foreign and domestic objectives and making bigoted campaign appeals to white suburbanites.
But Carlson’s influence extends beyond Trump, as he uses his program as a cudgel to push the GOP to adopt his cruel worldview. When some Republican politicians responded to police killings of Black Americans by expressing support for Black Lives Matter and calling for legislative efforts against police brutality, Carlson lashed out at them as capitulators who were betraying their voters, helping to end the party’s push and usher in a wave of GOP bills that would punish protesters. He has savaged GOP governors who refuse to sign maximally cruel bills denying trans youth access to gender-affirming medical care and sports. And his increased support for the white nationalist “replacement” conspiracy theory has Republican officeholders increasingly dipping their toes into those vile waters as well.
A champion for violent right-wing extremism
In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Carlson told his audience that “Joe Biden's voters really are a threat to you and your family,” while celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse’s lethal pro-Trump vigilantism as a natural effort to “maintain order when no one else would.” At the same time, he prepped his audience to treat a Trump defeat as a left-wing coup, in which Democrats had “manipulate[d] the results,” and warned that if they succeeded, “the people who've taken over the Democratic Party” would ban the First Amendment, smear their political opponents as white supremacists, and imprison them for hate speech. When Trump lost, Carlson claimed that the election was “not fair,” aiding the president’s effort to overturn the results based on baseless claims of massive voter fraud.
This stew of apocalyptic rhetoric, echoed by Trump and throughout the right-wing media, came to a head on January 6, when pro-Trump forces overwhelmed law enforcement and invaded the Capitol to try to prevent the transition of power. Since then, Carlson has relentlessly lied to his viewers to minimize those events, mocking the notion that the sacking of the Capitol constituted an “insurrection” and denying the involvement of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Proud Boys, and white nationalists. He’s used that alternate reality to tell his viewers that their lives and freedoms are endangered by the Democratic response that he claims constitutes a “new war against our own population.” In the days since, he’s presented an apocalyptic portrait of the future, in which the “abrupt change” the Democrats are supposedly pushing forces the right to support fascism.
