Popular U.S. news anchor Tucker Carlson, 53, was fired this week by Fox News, the channel under whose aegis he became the champion of the new conservative movement led by former President Donald Trump. His ouster from the Rupert Murdoch-owned media house came on the heels of a damaging lawsuit brought against Fox by election technologies company Dominion Voting Systems, which alleged that the news outlet had maligned their reputation and harassed their staff by dragging them into the unfounded right-wing conspiracy that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was “stolen” from Mr. Trump and handed to his Democratic rival and current President, Joe Biden. To avoid going to trial and facing potentially embarrassing revelations in court about anchors who deliberately propagated hateful misinformation on the election, some of it perhaps linked to the subsequent January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Fox News agreed to settle the Dominion case for a whopping $787.5 million. In the likely internal shake-up and shareholder anger that is said to have followed, reports suggest, Mr. Carlson may have been shown the door as a high-profile, prime-time Fox anchor whose career was dogged by too many controversies for the network to tolerate.
Also read: Explained | Why did Fox News opt to settle with election technology firm Dominion Voting Systems?
A privileged start
So, who is Mr. Carlson and how did he rise to such meteoric heights despite his blunt, unapologetic style, to the point where he ran roughshod over his colleagues at Fox? He Mr. Carlson was born in 1969 in San Francisco, California, in an upper middleclass family, to Richard Carlson, a media executive with the Voice of America and former CEO of The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Lisa McNear, an artist, who left the family when Mr. Carlson was six years old.
When he was 10, Mr. Carlson’s father remarried into a wealthy business family and both Mr. Carlson and his brother, Buckley, went to St. George’s, a Rhode Island private school. Following that, Mr. Carlson attended Trinity College, where, as he said in an interview, “He spent his days mostly drunk.” Mr. Carlson graduated in 1992 and married Susan Anderson, whom he knew from high school. Reports say that after college Mr. Carlson applied to the CIA, but his application was denied.
At that point his father is said to have advised him to consider journalism as “They’ll take anybody”, and thus Mr. Carlson began working for the now defunct Policy Review quarterly of the conservative Heritage Foundation, as — and the irony of this job would only be apparent later — a fact-checker. He continued to write for several major publications during the 1990s and landed a job as a CNN commentator in the early 2000s prior to signing up with MSNBC to host a nightly programme.
Big break with Fox
While he moved to Fox News in 2009 to work as a political analyst, his big moment in the spotlight finally came in 2016 after two seismic developments in the conservative media and political landscape. First, Mr. Carlson was given the just-vacated prime-time slot of 8 p.m. that was earlier held by disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — an anchor who left Fox News after reports emerged that millions of dollars had been paid out to women who had accused him of sexual misconduct. Second, and arguably more importantly, Mr. Trump came to power, giving Mr. Carlson the perfect opportunity to use his new prime-time slot to defend the embattled new President, with the specific aim of pandering to the Trump campaign’s core value of populist outrage fuelling divisive politics.
However, Mr. Carlson was not just another Trump acolyte. On the one hand, he reportedly said to friends and co-workers that he “needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating [another high-profile Fox anchor Sean] Hannity” — whom he felt was trapped in apologising for Mr. Trump’s everyday gaffes and missteps, given how frequently such incidents were occurring at the time. On the other, it was revealed during the Dominion lawsuit that Mr. Carlson privately repudiated Mr. Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims — even texting once to say that he hated the 45th President “passionately” — even though he publicly backed the conspiracy theories on air.
With this carefully curated political posture, soon the power of his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, was evident — it kicked off featuring a debut episode that attracted an audience of nearly 3.7 million people. With such soaring numbers, Mr. Carlson became a critical force shaping the very contours of American conservative philosophy, all the while flogging, according to the New York Times, “the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition…” By late 2018, the Tucker Carlson Tonight show had become the second highest-rated cable news programme in prime-time U.S. television, even though it had been boycotted by 20 advertisers after Mr. Carlson said that “unregulated” immigration made the U.S. “poorer and dirtier and more divided”.
Slippery slope
As successful as his show was, it equally became a pressure point for Mr. Carlson and Fox News to keep supplying supportive narratives, even when in reality there were none. Thus began the slippery slope that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s ouster following the Dominion case — even though that lawsuit was only the final nail in his professional coffin at the network.
Equally damning was the legal case brought by Abby Grossberg, a former Fox producer who served as Mr. Carlson’s head of booking and was fired by the network corporation after complaining of aggressive coaching and intimidation by Fox lawyers before she deposed in the Dominion lawsuit in September 2022, saying it left her “feeling pressured not to name names or to implicate others, in particular prominent male on-air personalities and Fox News executives”.
The Grossberg lawsuit also alleges that Fox News and Mr. Carlson specifically let the Tonight show become “a work environment that subjugates women based on vile sexist stereotypes, typecasts religious minorities and belittles their traditions, and demonstrates little to no regard for those suffering from mental illness”.
A second, potentially even more damaging development relating to the 2020 presidential election is a case brought by Smartmatic, another election technology company, which has filed a $2.7-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News — likely to have made it impossible to retain an anchor such as Mr. Carlson after evidence based on internal Fox documents surfaced proving “actual malice” on the part of senior network executives.
Speaking for the movement
While speculation is rife as to what Mr. Carlson will do next — especially in the light of a rambling video attacking mainstream media that he released online in recent days after his firing — there is little doubt that he will continue to speak for Trumpism, even if Mr. Trump is no longer at the helm of political affairs. Immigration controversies, racial hatred, and classical conservative anxiety about minorities of all hues will apparently serve readily as fodder for the likes of Mr. Carlson. Yet his success might well spell continuing pain for those who seek to realise the pluralist dream of the U.S. as “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.
