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When Tucker was 10, Dick remarried to Patricia Swanson of the Swanson frozen dinner fortune her uncle was Senator J. “Totally bizarre situation-which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all,” Carlson told The New Yorker in 2017. Their mother, Lisa McNear Carlson, left the family when he was six. Tucker was born in 1969, the older of two boys. Carlson is the son of Dick Carlson, a media executive, who used to direct the Voice of America and is a former CEO of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson was always going to be a journalist, if only through inertia and nepotism the talent was a bonus. If we can figure out how an intelligent writer and conservative can go from writing National Magazine Award–nominated articles and being hailed by some of the best editors in the business, to shouting about immigrants on Fox News, perhaps we can understand what is happening to this country, or at least to journalism, in 2018. The question, What happened to Tucker Carlson? is worth answering. “Is Kyle kind of dumb?” Carlson responds. I didn’t want to give up any of my sources, a few of whom still count him as a friend, so I stammered out my editor’s name. ICYMI: In a front-page story, NYT summed up McCain’s’s ability to control media-even in deathĪsk Tucker Carlson whatever happened to Tucker Carlson, and he gets upset. Perhaps fearful of what Carlson has become, few of his former editors were willing to talk on the record about his evolution, except for Brown, who noted crisply in an efficient, six-minute phone interview, “I really think Tucker is better than that.”
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Tina Brown, who worked with Carlson at her short-lived Talk magazine: “Tucker is a tremendously good writer and I always thought it was a real shame that he kind of like got sucked into this TV mania thing. I knew he would fit right in in Arkansas when I discovered that he chewed tobacco.”Īdam Myerson, Policy Review: “Tucker was an enterprising, hard-working shoe-leather reporter.”
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Paul Greenberg, who edited Carlson at The Arkansas Democrat Gazette : “Tucker was a pleasure to work with. writing was done with such energy and vitality.” Mark Warren, who edited him at Esquire: “He is an extremely talented writer.
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If you ask his former editors, they’ll say they’re wistful when they think about the old Tucker Carlson. If we can figure out how an intelligent writer and conservative can go from writing National Magazine Award–nominated articles to shouting about immigrants on Fox News, perhaps we can understand what is happening to this country, or at least to journalism, in 2018. He held up The New York Times as a standard bearer, begging writers “to go out there and find what is happening….not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media.” His pleas were met with boos.īut just six years later, Carlson was calling out The New York Times for pro-Clinton advocacy, and in June 2018 accused the paper of blatantly lying to the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Bashar Al-Assad, and Russian interference in the 2016 elections. In a speech Carlson gave to CPAC in 2009, he pleaded with conservative journalists to focus on reporting rather than punditry. There’s something to all the liberal hand-wringing. In June, Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic, “Carlson squandered his considerable God-given talent for scrupulously true commentary, opting instead for clickbait at The Daily Caller or dumbed-down demagoguery at Fox.” In a tweet, Jon Lovett of Crooked Media and Pod Save America, noted, “Tucker Carlson’s transition from conservative serious-ish writer to blustery CNN guy to Daily Caller troll to race-baiting Fox News host is like ice core data on what led to this moment in our politics.” What happened to Tucker Carlson? People in media ask themselves this question with the same pearl-clutching, righteous tone they use when discussing their aunt in Connecticut who voted for Trump. “Answer the question!” But the question is unanswerable. Reporters go on his show believing they’ll be discussing health care or Donald Trump’s mental health, only to be met with the question, “Do you think you are practicing journalism?” It’s pure Tucker Carlson, a move I’ve seen hundreds of times in the over 40 hours of Tucker Carlson Tonight clips I’ve watched on Fox News in recent months. We’ve moved from denial to acceptance in less than a minute. ICYMI: The story BuzzFeed, The New York Times and more didn’t want to publish I mean, sure he was shouting, but he’s a loud guy, okay ? “Because you are like, “I AM NOT SHOUTING!”Ĭarlson then tells me how he is the loudest person in the restaurant. That’s why this is funny,” I say laughing nervously.
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