Consider This from NPR - Tucker Carlson Built An Audience For Conspiracies At Fox. Where Does It Go Now?

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Fox's statement announcing the departure of Tucker Carlson, it's most watched primetime host, was a terse four sentences. "FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," it read.Carlson's brand of divisive and conspiracy theory-laden rhetoric helped fuel Fox's audience numbers. So what happens now that he is gone? And where will Carlson go?Mary Louise Kelly discusses all of the above with correspondents Shannon Bond and David Folkenflik, who cover misinformation and media matters for NPR.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. Viewed from 2023, the scene seems almost impossible to believe. Tucker Carlson is on the set of CNN's Crossfire. His co-host, Paul Begala, is ribbing him about a bet he'd made. A bet that if then-Senator Hillary Clinton's memoir sold a million copies, he would eat his shoes. The memoir hit the mark in just a month.

Kind of reminds me of the old prayer, dear Lloyd, make my words sweet and tender, for I may have to eat them. Tucker, you're going to have to eat some shoe leather, brother. You know, Paul, it wouldn't be the first time I've had to eat my words. Oh my God! Onto the set walks Hillary Clinton, holding a cake in the shape of a shoe. The audience laughs. Clinton and Carlson gamely ham it up. I really want you to notice, Tucker, that this is a wingtip. It's a right wing. Back in 2003, Tucker Carlson wore a trademark bow tie and had a provocative streak, but he was really a run-of-the-mill conservative pundit,

the kind of figure that C-SPAN would invite on for their open phone segment, and who would proudly defend the American press when a caller criticized it. Of course the press gets things wrong, and mostly their sins of shallowness, you know, not going far enough and putting stories into the appropriate context. Sure, there is some bias. But there is no press in the world as straightforward and accurate as the American press, said Carlson. What do you think people around the world read every morning? Serious people who want an understanding of what actually happened in the world the day before they read the New York Times. Two decades later, Carlson's bow tie is gone, and so are his establishment Republican politics. Instead, he has embraced a paranoid worldview fueled by racial resentment and status anxiety. One he's brought directly into the living rooms of millions of Americans with his own show on Fox since 2016. Welcome to the first edition of the eponymously named Tucker Carlson Tonight Show. I got a haircut for the show. We're glad you're here. Until this week. Hi, everybody, and welcome to Fox News Tonight. I am Brian Kilmeade.

As you probably have heard, Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. I wish Tucker the best. Consider this. Tucker Carlson dominated cable news by playing to his viewers' most divisive impulses. His rise at Fox helped build an appetite for hostility and conspiracies that may live on after his ouster. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Wednesday, April 26th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Fox's statement announcing Tucker Carlson's departure was terse. Just four sentences long. Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways, it read.

We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor. Unmentioned was Carlson's value to the network. He was Fox's most watched primetime host. Also unmentioned, his pivotal role in right-wing politics, nudging the Republican base into a realm of conspiracy and racial resentment alongside Donald Trump's rise. Another thing, the statement did not address the pending sex discrimination lawsuit against Fox and Tucker Carlson that may have led to his ouster. So to get a little more context, I spoke with NPR's media correspondent David F Falkenflik, and NPR's Shannon Bond, who covers of seething resentment, in some ways tempered by

a kind of malevolent mirth. You heard these sweeping accusations that the world was arrayed against the Fox viewer and by association, the Trump voter and against Fox News itself and Tucker Carlson. There's this us and them-ism. They are out to get us. Okay. So stay with that, the us versus them frame. And Shannon Bond, you jump in on this. Give us some examples of what he actually said and how that lines up or not against reality. Yeah. I mean, just to take a couple examples, January 6th, the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was a big focus for Tucker Carlson. At one point, he had described it essentially as a false flag operation by Antifa and the FBI. It sounds like, according to this, I have to say, remarkable piece that you just put up late last night, read it in bed at midnight, that the FBI was organizing the riots of January 6th.

He also then went on to describe it as a peaceful protest. He described the people at the Capitol as not as insurrectionists, but as sightseers. Protesters queue up in neat little lines. They give each other tours outside the speaker's office. They take cheerful selfies and they smile. And then perhaps the most extreme narrative that he pushed over and over again is this conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement. And it's this idea, this completely fictitious and racist idea that the U.S. and other Western countries are bringing in non-white immigrants to replace white people. And Tucker Carlson, in the context of the U.S., framed this as a deliberate push by

President Joe Biden and Democrats. You can't just replace the electorate because you didn't like the last election outcomes. That would be the definition of undermining democracy, changing the voters. I mean, this comes straight from far right forums, from white nationalist spaces. This is an idea that has been embraced by extremists, including the man accused of murdering 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket last year. So this is the kind of stuff he's like taking from the bowels of the internet and putting on air to, you know, 3 million people who are watching him every night, you know, on Fox News. It's really quite stunning. So that is what he is saying. That is what people were tuning in to see. Shannon, stay with that for a second.

Can we measure what the impact was, how he influenced right-wing politics? Well, it really was this sort of pipeline from, again, as I said, kind of the depths, the really kind of these very dark, very extremist spaces. It was also a bit reciprocal. And, you know, you get the sense that people I spoke to said, you know, Tucker Carlson really did have his finger on the pulse of the Republican base. And in many cases, he was giving much of the Fox audience what they wanted. It's worth noting, Mary Louise, that Carlson influences conservative and right-wing politics in a different way than some of his colleagues. He's not just sort of showing up at Republican

rallies like Sean Hannity does. You know, he's trying to influence where they go thought-wise. So, for example, he shows up at CPAC, the conservative conference, and tries to delineate where he thinks the party should be heading and the movement should be heading. He brings in somebody like Viktor Orban of Hungary, somebody known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies and also his anti-gay rhetoric and policies and normalizes that for Republicans. OK, so let's turn to developments of just these last few days. Tucker Carlson has said immigration made America poorer and dirtier. He spread conspiracy theories about vaccines, about other things.

These things did not get him fired. David Folkenflik, do we know what did? Well, I would say litigation focuses the mind. And there are two buckets that we can look at. Let's first talk about him being directly sued, along with Fox News and his former executive producer, Justin Wells, by their former top booker and producer for the show, a woman named Abby Grossberg. Booker is somebody who gets producer for the show, a woman named Abby Grossberg. Booker is somebody who gets guests on the show. She says that when she worked there, it was a place defined by sexism and bigotry and that it was so rife that it created a hostile place for her to work in.

Yeah, she just gave an interview to MSNBC in which she had a pretty stunning example of this. I show up first day of work. There are literally pictures like this big of Nancy Pelosi in a bathing suit in Europe, plastered all over. There was even one on my computer screen for the temporary computer I had to use and I had to take it down just to work. Yeah. And, you know, the executive, a top executive on the show, polled Grossberg and her colleagues by her account, not once, but two separate times on which of two leading female gubernatorial candidates in Michigan they would prefer to have sex with. And these are just examples of many. She also told NBC that she has 90, count them, 90 tapes of conversations involving colleagues at the network. Each one must be a dagger at the heart of the lawyers who've voting system defamation lawsuit against Fox, the huge one that just settled. What did we learn about how Carlson operated from the disclosures in that case? So as a result of what's called the discovery

process in that suit, Dominion's lawyers were able to secure over a million records from Fox. These are electronic exchanges, private texts and emails and slacks and notes and what have you. There were correspondence in there, according to three sources I spoke to that echo the kinds of concerns that Grossberg raised about bigotry, about misogyny and the like. Secondly, what we learned in the Dominion case is behind the scenes from the outset, he thought that the claims of Sidney Powell, a Trump ally who pushed some of these ridiculous conspiracy theories about voting machines changing votes, was laughable. On his own show, he finally, in late November of 2020, laced into Sidney Powell for failing to bring together evidence. primetime hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, about the fact that Fox News journalists were fact-checking and debunking the claims of Donald Trump and his allies in real time, including claims being made on Fox. He thought that was destroying the Fox brand and its promise

to viewers. The cynicism coursing through the bloodstream at Fox, very much a part of what Tucker Carlson was bringing there. Well, and he suggested on air, without evidence, that something nefarious had happened during the election. We don't know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night. We don't know anything about the software that many say was rigged. We don't know. We ought to find out. But here's what we do know. On a larger level, at the highest levels, actually, our system isn't what we thought it was. It's not as fair as it should be. Not even close. Sorry, hate to say that. It's the milk bottles at the fair. They knew you were coming. They laughed at you when you left. A rigged game, in other words. In terms of Fox,

the network, this has been, I would have thought, a chastening couple of weeks for them. They booted one of their biggest names. They paid out this massive settlement. Are we likely to see a chastened Fox, David? Are we likely to see changes in how this network operates? I think that you will see in the near term more care given to avoiding specific allegations that are defamatory against specific individuals and institutions that could prove legally actionable. And it may be chastened in the short term, but I think you're totally likely to see attacks on Biden, attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you know, critical race theory, trans activists and the like. It's just going to be less specific, so it's not going to be

legally a problem. But are we watching for a Fox that actually lives up to the name of Fox News, that fact-checks the journalism, and I'm putting that in quotes, that goes on its air? My sense is we haven't had that in quite a while. And we're also operating in this media landscape where there are now a lot of competitors to Fox that are even further right, that are even sort of further removed from reality. You know, you have platforms like the video platform Rumble, you have outlets like Newsmax. And, you know, Fox is very sensitive to what its audience wants and what the right-wing audience in general wants. And I think, as David said, I mean, these kind of these narratives, you know, this sort of the push around transphobia, you know, these culture war issues that clearly resonate with their audience. I just I don't see how they're not going to continue to cater to the whims of their audience.

Last question. What's next for Tucker Carlson, a figure who still wields huge clout with Republican voters? Do we have any idea what he might do with that? There hasn't a lot of speculation he could move to one of these even further right platforms, you know, something like Rumble, or frankly, that he might have the clout to launch his own platform. I mean, you know, I think Tucker is the type of personality who maybe has enough of an audience to strike out on his own. I mean, we also even saw RT, the Kremlin-backed media outlet, tweeting at Tucker after news of his ouster from Fox saying, hey, you know, hey, Tucker Carlson, you can always come on RT. So I don't think he'll have any shortage of places he could go. I think the question is

just how much of his audience he can bring with him. We have been speaking with NPR's Shannon Bond and NPR's David Falkenflick. Thanks to you both. You bet. Thank you. It's Consider This. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York,

working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.