TUCKER CARLSON
Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is an American conservative political commentator who has hosted the nightly political talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News since 2016. Carlson became a print journalist in the 1990s, writing for the magazine The Weekly Standard and others.
Born: May 16, 1969 (age 49 years), San Francisco, CA
Height: 6′ 1″
Spouse: Susan Andrews (m. 1991)
Education: Trinity College (1992), St. George's School, La Jolla Country Day School
Children: Hopie Carlson, Buckley Carlson, Lillie Carlson, Dorothy Carlson
Dancer: Failed first round “ Dancing with The Stars” Something about having his foot in his mouth made the turns and lifts hard...
Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson (born May 16, 1969) Carlson became a print journalist in the 1990s, writing for the magazine The Weekly Standard and others. He was a commentator on CNN from 2000 to 2005, also serving as co-host of Crossfire. Carlson then hosted the nightly program Tuckeron MSNBC from 2005 to 2008.
He has been a political analyst for Fox News since 2009. In 2010, Carlson co-founded and served as the initial editor-in-chief of the conservative news and opinion website The Daily Caller.
Carlson has written two books, the memoir Politicians, Partisans and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News (2003) and Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018).
STORMY DANIELS INFIGHTING
Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti ( Who is in hot water himself) sat
down with CNN’s Brian Stelter this morning to discuss his sparring
match with Tucker Carlson mere days ago.
To recap: after months of verbal sparring online and on TV, the
two men finally faced off in an interview that went off the rails right away. Avenatti
even asked Carlson at one point if he watches porn. And then, of course, there
were all the chyrons calling Avenatti the “creepy porn lawyer,” despite
Avenatti’s request beforehand.
Today Stelter asked why he went on in the first place, noting that many Democrats don’t go on Fox News.
“If you’re gonna be a fighter and you’re gonna fight for the future of this country and lead the Democratic party,” Avenatti said, “then you can’t be ducking fights. And frankly, sometimes you have to go into the belly of the beast.”
He did call Carlson “entirely unprofessional” but said he believes he came out of the interview victorious:
“Tucker looked terrible coming out of that interview. I mean, he constantly spoke over me. I thought the use of the ‘creepy porn lawyer’ at the bottom of the screen, which I was not aware of at the time otherwise I would’ve called him out on it––I thought that was completely unprofessional and uncalled for. And I think that Tucker lost whatever modicum of respect as a journalist he had left as a result of that interview.”
WENT FROM GOOD TO VERY BAD FOX FAUX NEWS SYNDROME
Years ago, Tucker Carlson was a well-regarded conservative writer with award-nominated articles and praise from journalism's top editors. Now, he shouts about immigrants, cries that big tech is stifling conservative voices, and poses questions like "How, precisely, is diversity our strength?" on his nightly Fox News show.
Carlson's journey has puzzled media critics for years. "What happened to Tucker Carlson?" they want to know. Now, Lyz Lenz, a writer with the Columbia Journalism Review, may have found the answer: Nothing.
Lenz sat down with Carlson for two and a half hours for her piece "The Mystery of Tucker Carlson" to figure out what Carlson's journey could tell her about journalism and America in 2018. She unpacked her findings for CNN’s Brian Stelter on this week’s Reliable Sources podcast.
The answer to "What happened to Tucker Carlson?" has actually existed for years, Lenz said.
"We want to think that, oh, this is a whole new shtick for him," Lenz told Stelter. "But actually, I think it's just part of who he's always been. If you look at a lot of his early writings... there has always been kind of a latent racism."
When it comes to his job at Fox News as host of a prime time show that's in the time slot previously held by Bill O'Reilly, Carlson often promotes a fear of immigrants taking over white, working-class jobs.
He rarely talks about President Donald Trump's challenges and behavior, according to Stelter. Instead, he dabbles in what a communications professor Lenz spoke with called "change-the-subject conservatism."
"You know, don't mind that burning building over there," Lenz said. "Let's look at this, you know, small kitchen fire over here."
Lenz describes herself as "a single mom, a freelance writer with two kids, swiftly facing a future with no health care." She lives in Iowa and is currently navigating a divorce after 12 years of marriage to a Republican. Lenz said the divorce "didn't come because of the election," but "the election certainly revealed a lot of huge problems that we couldn't overcome."
As a writer, she said, she sees metaphor everywhere; what she saw in her own life, she also saw in politics.
So, she wrote her profile of Carlson in the first person. She acknowledged it was daring, saying writers are "not supposed to make it about ourselves."
"When we're talking about Tucker Carlson, we're not just talking about Tucker Carlson," she said. "We're talking about America. And when we talk about America, we're not just talking about statistics. We're talking about individual lives that are changing and being impacted because of the politics in this country."
When it came time to sit down with Carlson, Lenz expected to have a fruitful conversation. She thought he would be similar to Hamlet -- "pretending to be crazy while pulling off a bigger scheme," she told Stelter.
This didn't happen. "It ended up just him yelling at me for two hours about free speech," Lenz said.
Carlson often depicts himself as a person of the people. But at
the same time, he makes millions. When Lenz asked about his lifestyle, Carlson
told her he had to provide for his family. 
"At one point, I said, 'You know, I have to provide for my family,'" Lenz told Stelter. "'I don't go on TV and shout about immigration.' And he was like, 'Oh, well, well, you're so noble and so good but me, you know, this is just what I had to do.' Which again, I think is just kind of a disingenuous deflection about the real state of things."
"I found the contrast really jarring," she said. "That me, this mom in the Midwest who's struggling to pay for health care, I'm the elite liberal media, but he's not."
NEW YORK (CNN)
A dozen companies
have announced they will either pull or suspend their advertising from Tucker
Carlson’s Fox News show over comments about immigration he made last week. They are Land Rover, IHOP, Ancestry.com, Just For Men, Minted, Smile Direct, Pacific
Life,
ScotteVest, Nerd Wallet, TD Ameritrade, Bowflex, CareerBuilder, Zenni and the
Chase United MileagePlus Explorer card had as of Tuesday afternoon all released
statements saying that they would no longer advertise on "Tucker Carlson
Tonight."
The retreat from Carlson's program came as liberal activists and organizations pressured companies to abandon the show.
Carlson, a conservative who has made the subject of immigration a hallmark of his program, made the comments that led to the advertisers' decisions on Thursday night, when he said on his show that mass-immigration "makes our country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided."
After an initial backlash that included at least three advertisers pulling their commercials, Carlson defended those comments on his show Monday night, showing images of trash left at the US-Mexico border and arguing that "huge swaths of the region are covered with garbage and waste" left behind by immigrants "that degrade the soil and kill wildlife."
Carlson added on Monday night that "the left" wants him to "shut up," but that he would not because he was "not intimidated."
In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, a Fox News spokesperson said, "We cannot and will not allow voices like Tucker Carlson to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts from the likes of Moveon.org, Media Matters and Sleeping Giants."
The Fox News spokesperson added, "While we do not advocate boycotts, these same groups never target other broadcasters and operate under a grossly hypocritical double standard given their intolerance to all opposing points of view."
The Fox News spokesperson said that all of the advertisers were moving their commercials to other shows on the network and that as a result no revenue had been lost.
Some companies have released statements suggesting that they would continue to run advertisements on the program.
Fox News has faced similar advertiser boycotts before.
In April, more than a dozen companies said they would no longer advertise on Laura Ingraham's show after Ingraham mocked David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting who has become a vocal advocate for gun control.
Last year, a separate advertiser backlash hit Carlson's predecessor on Fox News' 8 p.m. hour, Bill O'Reilly, after a New York Times report about settlements with women who alleged either sexual harassment or verbal abuse by O'Reilly. The number of advertisers pulling their commercials eventually grew to at least 60, and O'Reilly was eventually pushed out of Fox.
Lots more coming as he will not shut up...
LAST NIGHT IN THE PANHANDLE
Before President Donald T-RUMP’s rally began tonight, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson opened by mocking CNN’s coverage of the New York Times report obtaining ten years of Trump tax information, particularly Don Lemon‘s. Lemon went on a tear last night calling Trump a “con man,”.
Carlson said; He and everyone else on CNN are basically making a mountain out of a molehill. After playing another clip of Lemon roasting Trump, Carlson said, “Don Lemon is easily amused and he was thrilled last night. When the whole point of your network is to attack a single person, this is a major story.”
He said this should be no surprise to anyone and that the lesson is “you can steal someone’s private tax information, put it on television, and nobody even pauses or asks whether that’s a good idea, much less an invasion of privacy”:
“Are those the rules now? According to Democrats, yes they are the rules. Lawmakers in New York are preparing legislation that would force the release of Trump’s tax returns. But why stop there? How about his medical records? The Fake Draft Dodging - 58,000 dead soldiers would like to know how that scumbag beat the reaper.
ANOTHER BATTLE KAMAU BELL AND CARLSON...
In the second episode of the travel show’s fourth season—KAMAU Bell, who interviewed members of the Ku Klux Klan for his 2016 premiere, has joked that he “samples racism” the way Anthony Bourdain sampled food—
We see a clip of Carlson labeling him a leader of the Antifa movement after he spoke at an anti-hate rally in his native Berkeley. At the time, Bell really wanted to clap back at Carlson on social media, but CNN convinced him to hold his fire.
“CNN was worried about looking like they are at war with Fox News,” Bell tells me during our conversation for this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “So they sort of talked to me about, hey, don’t get in a war with Tucker Carlson.”
He managed to restrain himself in the moment. “But I’m going to hold this,” he remembers thinking. “I’m a comedian and an only child. So I keep grudges.”
The comedian also reveals that Carlson’s bookers at Fox reached out to CNN to try to get him on his show. Even if CNN had allowed it, “There is no circumstance in which I would do that,” he says. “I’d rather talk to the Klan again. At least they’re honest.”
“Despite what maybe my wife would think, I’m a really good listener. I don’t have to agree with you to listen to you. I think a lot of times it’s important, especially when you disagree with someone, to be quiet and let them get all their stuff out. Because people are so ready to be interrupted when they know they’re saying something you don’t agree with. And if you interrupt them, it very quickly derails the conversation into a battle of who can talk louder or faster. And you see that all the time on TV.”
ON TUCKER CARLSON LABELING HIM A LEADER OF ANTIFA
“Oh, fuck him. So that happened right around the time there were all these alt-right marches in Berkeley. And the first time it happened, Berkeley didn’t take it that seriously. Then they came back another time and Berkeley didn’t take it that seriously, and then the third time every anti-racist activist in the surrounding area showed up and outnumbered them and I was a part of that.
That’s why I went, not to confront them—there were fights that broke out—but most people just went to show that we’re going to put our bodies here to show that you’re not going to take over this area. It’s not OK. They gave me a megaphone at one point and I was like, ‘This is the Berkeley I believe in and we’re all here together showing up.’
And Tucker Carlson clipped out the ‘Bye, Nazis, bye’ part, as if that’s a bad thing to say. He manipulated it to say that I was somehow part of Antifa and Antifa’s a ‘hate’ organization so therefore W. Kamau Bell peddles hate.”
Why he’s not so sure about his hometown candidate Kamala Harris
“You know, there are a lot of black men in jail because of Kamala Harris. And in jail for too long because of Kamala Harris. She certainly is a popular figure in the Bay Area, but she’s not popular with the most progressive people. So for me, I’m not saying that I wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris, but I’m not here to stump for anybody right now.”
TRACK RECORD
CNN (2000–2005)
In 2000, Carlson co-hosted the short-lived show The Spin Room.
In 2001, Carlson was appointed co-host of Crossfire.
In October 2004, Carlson had an exchange with Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central.Stewart argued that Carlson and the nature of his show were harmful to political discourse in the United States. Carlson later recalled that Stewart had stayed at CNN for hours after the show to discuss the issues he had raised on the air. "It was heartfelt," Carlson said, "He Stewart needed to do this." In 2017, The New York Times referred to Stewart's "on-air dressing-down" of Carlson as an "ignominious career moment" for Carlson. According to the Times, Stewart’s criticism "led to the cancellation of the show".
In January 2005, CNN announced they were ending their relationship with Carlson and would soon cancel Crossfire, CNN chief Jonathan Klein told Carlson on January 4, 2005, that the network had decided not to renew his contract.
Carlson has said that he had already resigned from CNN and Crossfire long before Stewart was booked as a guest, telling host Patricia Duff: “ resigned from Crossfire in April 2004, many months before Jon Stewart came on our show, because I didn’t like the partisanship, and I thought in some ways it was kind of a pointless conversation ... each side coming out, you know, 'Here's my argument', and no one listening to anyone else...
MSNBC (2005–2008) Main article: Tucker Carlson’s early evening show, Tucker premiered on June 13, 2005, on MSNBC. In July 2006, he reported live for Tucker from Haifa, Israel, during the 2006 Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. While in the Middle East, he also hosted MSNBC Special Report: Mideast Crisis.
Tucker lasted fewer than three full seasons. The network announced its cancellation due to low ratings on March 10, 2008, and the final episode aired on March 14, 2008.
Brian Stelter of The New York Times wrote that "during Mr. Carlson's tenure, MSNBC's evening programming moved gradually to the left. His former time slots, 6 and 9 p.m., were then occupied by two liberals, Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow." Carlson stated that the network had changed a lot and "they didn't have a role for me."
Fox News Channel (2009–present)
In May 2009, Fox News announced that Carlson was being hired as a Fox News contributor. And was a substitute host of Hannity in Sean Hannity’s absence.
In March 2013, it was announced that Carlson would co-host the weekend editions of Fox & Friends; he had been a contributor and frequent guest host on the program.
He replaced Dave Briggs, who left the news channel to join the NBC Sports Network in January 2013. Beginning in April, Carlson officially joined co-hosts Allyson Camerota and Clayton Morris on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
Tucker Carlson Tonight (2016–present) On November 14, 2016, Carlson started hosting Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. Tucker Carlson Tonight was created to replace the show On the Record.
The show debuted as "the network's most watched telecast of the year in the time slot".. The program's premiere episode, viewed by 3.7 million, was rated higher than previous editions of On the Record.
Tucker Carlson Tonight aired at 7 p.m. ET each weeknight until January 9, 2017, when Carlson's show replaced Megyn Kelly at the 9 p.m. ET time slot after she left Fox News.
In January 2017, Forbes reported that the show had "scored consistently high ratings, averaging 2.8 million viewers per night and ranking as the number two cable news program behind The O'Reilly Factor in December 2016.
In March 2017, Tucker Carlson Tonight was the most watched cable program in the 9 p.m. time slot.
On April 19, 2017, it was announced that Tucker Carlson Tonight would air at 8:00 p.m. following the cancellation of The O'Reilly Factor. Tucker Carlson Tonight was the third-highest-rated cable news show as of March 2018.
In October 2018, Tucker Carlson Tonight was the second-highest rated cable news show in prime time, after Hannity, with 3.2 million nightly viewers. By January 2019, it dropped to third with 2.8 million nightly viewers, down six percent for the year.