Front Burner - How Tucker Carlson mastered Fox News fear and outrage

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

For over seven years on Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight leveraged immigration, vaccines and racial tensions to divide viewers’ worlds into “us” and “them”. Carlson became a kingmaker who could make or break Republican primary campaigns or set the policy agenda. Then, this week, the show’s incendiary reign atop cable news ended, when Fox News sent him packing. Today on Front Burner, New York Times political and investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore explains the political transformation that informed the world of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and what could be next for one of the most powerful voices in right-wing politics. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Alex Panetta, in for Jamie Poisson. To hear Whoopi Goldberg in the audience at The View on Monday, you'd think some tyrant had just been overthrown. The word has just come down that Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. Come on, folks. Na, na, na, na.

Na, na, na, na. Hey, hey, hey. Over seven plus years of hosting Tucker Carlson tonight on Fox, Carlson had become the most powerful, polarizing figure on television. The great replacement? Yeah, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's their electoral strategy. television. Through Donald Trump's presidency, his show soared to the top of cable news ratings. He became a kingmaker on the right. His show could make or break Republican primary campaigns. It could set the policy agenda. Other Americans, they loathed him.

His detractors pointed to misleading, demagogic rants about race and immigration. We have a moral obligation to admit the world's poor, they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided. Vaccination, January 6th, a stoking fear and paranoia. Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. January 6th barely rates as a footnote. Really, not a lot happened that day.

But on Monday, several years of incendiary television ended with not even a flicker. Fox News announced Carlson had already hosted his last show days earlier. It came just a week after the historic Fox payout in the Dominion defamation case. For analysis on this extraordinary development in television news, I'm speaking today with New York Times political and investigative reporter Nicholas Confessori. He's done deep reporting on this conservative icon, on Tucker Carlson's life story, on his modus operandi as a TV host, and on what his rise tells us about the U.S. political right. Hi, Nick. Hey, how are you doing? Pretty well, thanks. I want to start with your reaction. I mean, you've written that Tucker Carlson's show is by some measures the most successful in the history of cable news, and he seemed to be the future of Fox News. So, yeah, what's your initial response to what happened Monday? You know, Tucker Carlson's been fired.

almost everybody else who wasn't involved in his firing. We have some news from within our Fox family. Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have mutually agreed to part ways. We want to thank Tucker Carlson for his service to the network as a host and prior. And it's partly because the story of his career at Fox until now has been mostly a story of Fox refusing to fire him over and over again for content on his show, for behavior internally. He has always managed to hold on, no matter how controversial his content is, no matter how many themes or ideas he borrows from white nationalists or how often he repeats them, as long as he got ratings

and helped the audience, he seemed to be doing fine. Which raises the inevitable question that what was it that finally put them over the edge? Do we have any inkling of why Carlson and Fox parted ways? Well, I think we're all at this moment, people who cover Fox and cover cable TV, cover the media like me, are trying to answer that question. But I think it would be wise to just consider the obvious, which is that his firing comes shortly after the conclusion of a libel case, a landmark one here in the U.S. Today's settlement of $787,500,000 represents vindication and accountability. Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company, our employees, and the customers that we serve.

Which resulted in part in the release of thousands of pages of internal emails and private texts from Carlson and other hosts and producers and executives of Fox. According to court documents, host Tucker Carlson texted a producer on January 4th, 2021, just two days before the Capitol attack. We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. The conversation continues. Referring to Trump, Carlson says, I hate him passionately. I can't handle much more of this.

And we in the public have only seen a taste of what was in the documents that were provided during discovery. Fox's lawyers have everything. If you think about it, it's almost certain that Fox asked for Tucker Carlson's phone and imaged it, so to speak, and they have a copy of everything he said. So I just have to imagine that these things are related and that we're looking at something that's not just about the stuff he says on the air, which he's been safely doing for six years, but something that happened recently or became known recently.

Okay, well, you alluded to, you know, great replacement stuff a second ago, the kinds of things he would say about race and other things. Can you just sort of elaborate on what's the worldview that he would present to Americans every night, the us against them kind of stuff that he would deliver to his viewers on a nightly basis. I think what Carlson was exceptionally good at doing and what made him a really successful TV host was that he told a story in chapters. And he told a version of the same story every night. It just continued from night to night. And the basic story is that they are up to get you. And they is the somebody amorphous, but often specific group, the ruling class. Time to check in with our lizard overlords in Davos, Switzerland.

It's Democratic politicians and sometimes Republican politicians. They're always inventing new rights for illegal aliens. Usually the right to free stuff at your expense or a lot of those. Journalists like me, it's elite academics, bureaucrats, policymakers. And so from Hollywood to Silicon Valley to MSNBC, a new... And they are out to destroy you. The same people lecturing you about free speech would be the very first to call for your job if you dared stray from the approved script of acceptable public discourse they so assiduously maintain. This may be a lot of things, this moment we're living through, but it is definitely not about Black lives. And remember that when they come for you, and at this rate they will. You implicitly is Fox's audience, which is overwhelmingly white and predominantly older. And the stories that he

would choose to illustrate these themes often made clear who was the instrument of this destruction. It was immigrants. Well, this is the magical world of our elites, people who've never had to worry about how illegal immigrants might affect their kids' schools. An unrelenting stream of immigration. But why? Well, Joe Biden just said it, to change the racial mix of the country. That's the reason, to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the third world. Usually, and Carlson's telling, from Africa, from the Middle East, or South and Central America. And they were being, and this is again,

part of a conspiracy theory that he imported from the far right. These immigrants were being deliberately imported into the U.S. by the ruling class to quote unquote, replace the quote unquote, legacy Americans. Again, a dog whistle term, that last one that he borrowed from the racist Westman. If you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the third world. But they become hysterical because that's that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it. That's true.

It's fascinating that he presents himself as the avatar of the aggrieved everyman. When you trace the arc of his life, and I'd like to talk about that a little bit, what do we know about his family, where he comes from, what was his upbringing like? Well, he had a somewhat difficult, really, childhood. As I reported last year, his mother and his father split up when he was young. His father alleged that his mother was abusing drugs and not taking care of the kids. And he came from a very interesting family. On his mother's side, he came from a family of landowners from the Gilded Age that once owned a huge proportion of the West Coast and built a ranching empire. It's an amazing story because a lot of that land was acquired from Mexicans who found themselves on the wrong side of the border after the American-Mexican War.

of the border after the American-Mexican War. And years later, the sign of the family is in vain against those very same people saying, it's our land, it's not theirs. But he had a preppy American childhood. He grew up mostly in Washington, the heart of blue America in some ways, you know, went to boarding school. And he had a peripatetic career. He was a lively magazine writer and a successful one, and that got him onto TV. He started out mostly on CNN. And for years,

he was a co-host of Crossfire, which has been a popular show in the George W. Bush years in Washington. How old are you? 35. And you wear a bow tie. Yeah, I do. So this is... I know, I know. Let me just go. Now, come on. I had a brief show on MSNBC, went on to found the Daily Caller. And that's where I think his story becomes politically very interesting, because Carlson had been sort of an American libertarian. And I'm not sure he had deeply felt political views, but that was the tradition he identified with most. And over the course of the post-911 era, he began to adopt more nativist views. He became convinced that immigration was bad for working-class Americans, that it was a scandal. And he also turned against the Iraq War after doing a story there for Esquire.

And that was also part of this transformation to a different American political tradition, which is what we call paleoconservatism. It often combines skepticism of immigration or hatred of it with a skepticism of overseas entanglements. You can call it America first. And the people who let this happen should be punished. The Americans who let it happen, the casual recklessness they displayed, the utter incompetence. It's all an insult to the memory of the thousands of Americans who died in Iraq. This mismanagement of that country by our elites is one of the saddest things America has ever done. Well, I'd love to ask you about two things you just identified, the immigration turn and then the turn against the deep state, foreign entanglements, the America First component. So when did the immigration shift happen?

in his own words about why and where his views changed. What I can tell you is that having read almost every word he's written and watched transcripts of many of his shows over the years, you could see the turn happening shortly after 9-11 and perhaps even right before it. So just remember in the late 1990s and the early George W. Bush administration was when the U.S. saw the highest flows of illegal immigration from the South in years. It was huge. It's a big story. And if you watch his commentary, he begins to ape and imitate Patrick Buchanan, who was kind of the original pundit politician and builder in the way that Carlson became later. And you see him taking

language more and more and ideas more and more from the nativist side of the American political spectrum. And eventually, he found the Daily Caller, which is a conservative tabloid, and one of the first to really harness virality and have a really good sense of what conservative readers really wanted. And I think it became clear to him and his staff there that grassroots conservatives, many conservative readers in their audience were furious about immigration in a way that the GOP hadn't yet become responsive to. And yet to remember, in 2012 after obama won re-election you know the party leaders had set out to kind of revamp the gop and one of their ideas was to broker some kind of a deal on immigration reform and that didn't actually happen it ended up

leading to a huge break within the party that kind of ended with donald j trump's rise amazing and what talking about you know the deep state american entanglements abroad a huge break within the party that kind of ended with Donald J. Trump's rise. Amazing. And talking about the deep state, American entanglements abroad, one of the most delicious coincidences of his bio, if you ask me, is the fact that his father literally ran Voice of America, the outlet dedicated to this mission of spreading democracy and the American worldview around the world. Armchair psychologists have given different reasons for Tucker's shift on this. Like maybe he's mad that his application to the CIA got rejected, but you wrote about a trip he took to Iraq during the U.S. invasion. What happened there and how did that change his

view of America's mission in the world? Well, I think he went there as kind of a half-committed neoconservative. You know, in those years, I was in Washington then. I was covering it as a reporter. And the only debate, really, in those years was the war on terror and the Iraq war. It consumed everything. And there was not a lot of room for a conservative in those days to be against the Iraq war and against the expanding war on terror. He went there to Iraq to do a story. And he came back and he realized that the people in Iraq were

angry we were there, or at least some of them were, that it was a tinderbox, that our presence there was not going to build a stable democracy, and that something was very wrong. And he's written in his own work about how that experience turned him into a committed opponent of what we sometimes call the neoconservative foreign policy view. And from there on, you know, in American politics, it's often the case that that kind of opposition to the Iraq War as an unnecessary foreign entanglement often goes hand in hand with a set of views about immigration and the preservation of American culture that he also now espouses. And it's kind of interesting. I mean, like he's got his sympathy to Russia and Putin. I mean, what does that look like or sounded like on his airwaves? Well, he often took what we

might call an isolationist point of view, but he went farther than that. He really was talking the same line that Kremlin propaganda outlets would talk that NATO expansionism was to blame for Putin invading Ukraine. This point, NATO exists primarily to torment Vladimir Putin, who, whatever his many faults, has no intention of invading Western Europe. Vladimir Putin does not want Belgium. He just wants to keep his Western border secure. Wait a second. Why is it? He sometimes, Carlson sometimes made the argument that the only reason we were there was some kind of convoluted payback to the Bidens for Hunter Biden's entanglement in Ukraine in

business there. He had guests on his show that were constantly predicting the imminent fall of Ukraine to Russia. And in general, I would say more broadly, he has made common cause with, you know, people like Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary. What does Viktor Orban believe? Just a few years ago, his views would have seemed moderate and conventional. He thinks families are more important than banks. He believes countries need borders. For saying these things out loud, Orban has been vilified.

Left-wing NGOs have denounced him as a fascist, a destroyer of democracy. have denounced him as a fascist, a destroyer of democracy. Who, while not pro-Putin, is sort of on this axis of authoritarian-ish leaders, or authoritarian openly leader in the case of Putin, who have positioned themselves as the defenders of Christendom and Western civilization or conservative family value civilization against a decadent Western Europe, right? And so you see these trends all come together on the airwaves. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

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50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. So I want to ask you about the real Tucker Carlson versus what we see on TV. And I'm going to begin this with the Canadian angle. Just this month, we got a preview of Carlson's Fox documentary about tyranny in Canada. He even suggested the U.S. could invade Canada. For more than 100 years, the United States has,

as a matter of official policy, opposed dictatorships around the world. But what if tyranny arrived right next door? What would that look like? And what would our government do in response? Would we liberate the people living under authoritarian rule as we have around the world? That is the topic of our upcoming Tucker Carlson Originals documentary, Oh Canada. I'm guessing that was tongue in cheek, but this is the same guy who also attacked green M&Ms, the candies. M&Ms will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous until the moment you wouldn't want to have a drink with any one of them. That's the goal. When you're totally turned off,

we've achieved equity. They've won. So I've got to ask the question a thousand think pieces have tried to answer, which is, does Carlson really believe the stuff he's spouting on his show, or is he just trying to drum up outrage for views? I really believe that it's a combination of the two. And here's what that means. I believe that he proceeds from a genuine worldview. And it's very flawed in some ways. It's factually incorrect in others. But he proceeds from the worldview that immigration is really bad for America and that overseas wars are really bad for america which i think

he has more evidence on his side for that and that's his basic worldview and it shapes his programming or it did when he was on the air but also keep in mind that he is plugged into a ratings machine fox's mission is to keep their audience and make money tucker's job while he was on the air before he was fired was to hold on to the audience in his eight o'clock time slot by hook and by crook, whatever it took. And so you can imagine that as you begin to understand what buttons you can push and what dials you can turn up to juice your ratings, what plays well, what gets people going, that you begin to lean into certain themes, elevate them, sharpen them, go farther and harder.

And I think that as one former Fox official had put it to me while I was working on my story last year, anger is really good for boosting ratings for Fox. You have to keep, it's important to keep the audience angry. But even better than that, and what's worked in the last few years is anger plus fear. And to keep the audience, Tucker would every night go on the air and say, they are coming for you. They're coming for your kids, for your culture, for your M&Ms, for your straw, for your stoves, for your meat, they're coming for you. And that was the way that you built that audience. You have to keep them locked in and scared and tuning in for the next installment. So yeah, there's a little

bit of shtick in there, but who's the joke on really? Because if you build a program and to some extent a network that is based entirely on, we have to find something today that will outrage people. Then you end up making mountains out of molehills. I'm not sure if this is on the air on Fox, it probably was, but you know, so Bud Light does one promo with a transgender woman for Bud Light. Bud Light has just released a commemorative can celebrating a man who dresses up like a woman. Bud Light has just released a commemorative can celebrating a man who dresses up like a woman. His name is Dylan Mulvaney. Here's a listen.

Suddenly, Bud Light is like a player in the woke wars. Everyone has to be angry about it. You can't just drink your Bud Light. You have to take a side. You have to be part of like a bigger cultural ferment. Something terrible has happened. You have been wronged if they decide to do Instagram promo with a trans influencer. Suddenly that becomes a dagger in the heart of America. That's how this kind of programming works. Everyone's got to be mad all the time. and it became the policy of the Republican Party. Can you give me some examples of ways that Tucker Carlson changed the conversation or got a cause-and-effect reaction from politicians?

Well, I think he was instrumental in advancing the candidacies for Senate of J.D. Vance in Ohio. J.D. Vance is running for Senate from the state of Ohio. We have been told repeatedly his election would be the end of democracy. We thought we'd check that claim with him now. J.D. Vance, thanks so much. And the gentleman, Blake Masters, in Arizona. Blake Masters is running in the other big race in the state of Arizona, which, like the governor's race, is still nowhere near being settled. He says there is evidence of true screw-ups in ballot counting. Now, Masters lost as General Vance won in Ohio, but I'm not sure those two candidates get the nomination in their states without Carlson backing them, having them on the air. I would say, more importantly, he popularized replacement theory for the mainstream right. It's one thing,

and I think totally reasonable, to say, you know what, I think that immigration policy in the US should be based on what's best for current citizens. And we should figure out, you know, what's the optimum kinds of immigration policies that would benefit people who live here. And that should be our policy. And it's also totally reasonable to say, you know, I think things are out of control at the border, how do we fix that? It's a big leap to say that the reason people are coming across the border is because there is an elite conspiracy to bring people here to replace you to win elections. If you change the population of a country without the consent of the people who live there, is that democracy? First of all, it's not true. And you notice there's never any evidence of this conspiracy, right? When you ask, I believe,

you know, Tucker once on his show took a very badly edited and mangled video of Biden talking in one context and tried to kind of twist it into Biden saying that he wanted to replenish the American racial stock. For the first time in 2017, we'll be in an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolute minority. Fewer than 50 percent of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock. That's it. It was very bizarre and weird. But the point is, that's the best they could do. And it shows the weakness that there really isn't any there there. There are a lot of reasons why people make the journey

and try and cross in the U.S., often without permission, sometimes seeking asylum. I don't think it's really great for Joe Biden and the Democrats right now that the border is as people are concerned about it. But I think Carlson repeated that idea on his show over and over again for years. Hundreds of segments over hundreds of days were devoted to either an explicit or implicit version of replacement theory. And think of how powerful that is. If you're an older person and you're wrestling with changes in your community, some new people move in, they may look different from you. And all of a sudden you have a guy saying, you know what, it's actually a conspiracy to replace you, to get rid of you.

I mean, you've kind of identified two sources of power, the ability to endorse, to promote the careers of certain politicians, but also the ability to shape policy. And you mentioned the replacement theory, but, you know, the war in Ukraine, Republican support for it, sending immigrants to Martha's Vineyard. Fifty undocumented migrants, including several children, arriving in Martha's Vineyard. Vineyard, flown in by Florida Republican Governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, an effort to turn the spotlight to immigration just two months before the midterm elections. Like, how much of a role did Tucker Carlson play in popularizing these ideas? Like, was this Tucker Carlson's work? Certainly on the question of Ukraine, he was by far the biggest and most important voice in American media, arguing that our help for Ukraine was a mistake. It's notable and important that Kremlin state media made a point of recycling Carlson segments domestically with subtitles.

They loved having one of America's most popular television hosts essentially make the argument that they were making. most popular television hosts, essentially make the argument that they were making. And they issued command. There was a great story in Mother Jones showing that they issued memos saying, let's use Tucker clips as often as we can on our own air back in Russia. And I don't have any reporting to suggest that he gave Ron DeSantis that idea. But you're right that for years, Tucker on his show has raised that idea. Let's send them to the Hamptons. I think he may even have once proposed sending immigrants to Martha's Vineyard. They are begging for more diversity. Why not send migrants there

in huge numbers? Let's start with 300,000 and move up from there. As the island gets stronger, more. Small Massachusetts island. That was the kind of provocation he reveled in. Let's take these immigrants and instead of putting them in communities in the South, let's put them in the backyards of the rich people who think it's so great to have immigration. And so in a sense, he is the grandfather of that idea. Let's look ahead then. You've got one of the most powerful and recognized men in conservative America who's suddenly a free agent. And the question is, what does he do with all this power now? Running for president, is that in any way possible? You know, I would have said before that it was a very low probability. According to my reporting, Carlson stoked the idea that he might run because it gave him power and leverage within Fox. I think he was being honest when he

would talk about running for president as a terrible idea and a job that he wasn't suited for. I'm not sure he wants that. But on the other hand, it seems like it could be a little more likely if he doesn't have a Fox show to keep him busy. So, you know, I can't I can't think of what's in his mind right now. I sort of take him at his word in the past when he's expressed basically a loathing of the idea of being a candidate. He can have a lot of influence on the presidential race, a lot of influence, if he's able to stand up some kind of a new media platform that would allow him to have some part of the influence he had at Fox. And in a way, that can be a little more fun and profitable. Well, we'll see what the next chapter looks like. Thanks so much, Nick. Really appreciate this. My pleasure.

That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner. I'm Alex Panetta, in for Jamie Poisson. Talk to you tomorrow.