How Tucker Carlson reshaped Fox News — and became Trump’s heir (via nytimes)
The New York TimesAfter years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’ evening lineup just months after Donald Trump’s upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.
He began seeking out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird” and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture. He inveighed against Macy’s new line of hijabs and devoted a segment to “Gypsy” refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Carlson said had left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human feces.” He cataloged, and magnified, overlooked instances of what he cast as growing discrimination against white Americans.
Today, Carlson’s influence reaches far beyond the channel he works for or the audience that tunes in to his show. Trump is out of office and banned or suspended from the leading social media platforms. But Carlson remains, both high priest and champion of Trump’s most ardent followers.
To help redesign “Tucker Carlson Tonight” for the 8 p.m. hour, Fox assigned Ron Mitchell, a former O’Reilly producer recently promoted to Fox’s executive ranks, where he would supervise “story development” across prime time. Fox had always excelled not just at attracting more viewers than its rivals but at getting them to stick around longer, giving an added bump to its Nielsen ratings.
Murdoch ran the new Fox enterprises — now a stripped-down company with Fox News at its core — from across the country, in Los Angeles. In mid-2018, he announced the appointment of Suzanne Scott, an Ailes-era network veteran, as the new Fox News CEO.
Shortly after the attack, longtime anchor Shepard Smith, a beloved figure in the Fox newsroom, threw a brushback pitch at his own network. “There is no invasion,” he told viewers of his afternoon news show. “No one’s coming to get you.” Whether or not the caravan threatened America, however, it was a boon to Fox: That October, ratings were even higher than they had been right before the 2016 presidential election.
Then the Murdoch empire stepped in. In the winter of 2018, reporters for a Murdoch-owned Australian tabloid, The Daily Telegraph, contacted AfriForum, a self-styled civil rights group for South Africa’s Afrikaner white minority. For months, with little success, the group had been circulating widely contested studies claiming to show that white farmers faced a disproportionate risk of being killed and brutalization.
Carlson’s coverage sparked a rare high-level dispute inside the network. During a subsequent meeting of Fox’s senior executives, Brian Jones, president of Fox Business Network and the highest-ranking Black man in Fox leadership, explained that almost everything Carlson was saying on the air was wrong.
Most of Murdoch’s subordinates were unsurprising, according to several people who viewed the chart. But one came as a shock: Peter Brimelow, founder of the website VDare. In August 2018, Brimelow was spotted at a birthday party for Trump adviser Larry Kudlow, drawing an article in The Washington Post and prompting the White House and Kudlow to distance themselves from Brimelow. But at Fox, some took the Brimelow discovery as an indirect explanation for the latitude Fox had extended Carlson on South Africa. If Murdoch had someone like Brimelow working for him, the former employee reasoned, he would have little objection to Carlson peddling far-right themes.
That February, Carlson hosted the Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, who touted Orban’s hard line against immigration and his efforts to encourage families to have more children. And this past summer, Carlson traveled to Budapest to produce what was in effect an extended infomercial for the Orban government.
In the end, Carlson proceeded with his plans, and by the following spring, The Sun Journal reported that his new studio was complete. He put his Washington house up for sale and began living in Maine much of the year, taping “Tucker Carlson Tonight” from Bryant Pond. A month later, Carlson landed in Los Angeles for a weeklong West Coast stint. Minutes after arriving in the bureau, he tracked down Gallo, who was sitting in an office talking to two colleagues. “Are you Dan Gallo?” he interrupted. When Gallo tried to introduce himself, an indignant Carlson simply handed him a blue notecard with his cellphone number. The next time Gallo had a problem with his show, Carlson said, he should “do the honorable thing” and call.
When Corbin reported the incident to Fox management, Carlson denied making such a call, according to the former executive. He was soon back to explaining to his viewers how liberals and Big Tech wanted them to “just shut up.”It was a frequent refrain on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”– and a calculated one. According to former Fox employees, Carlson and his team had learned to work the calls for boycotts and cancellation into their programming playbook.
Other advertising slots were taken by direct-to-consumer brands that either didn’t care about Carlson’s bad publicity or saw that they could use his intensity to sell their products. Beginning in January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose CEO, Mike Lindell, is a major promoter of Trump’s stolen election lie, began airing more than $1 million worth of ads on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” each month.
His critics at Fox found themselves further marginalized: After an on-air feud with Carlson over the legality of Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials, Shepard Smith was reportedly warned against criticizing his fellow host — something the network denies — and he departed Fox in October 2019. Carlson’s ratings grew, buoyed by the increasingly heated and apocalyptic presidential campaign.
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