Tucker Carlson, the podcaster and former Fox News host, once told a hostile conservative crowd that rightwing media needed to be more responsible. In a 2009 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he argued that publications on the right should hold themselves to a higher standard.
“This is the hard truth,” Carlson said. “If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail.” Conservatives loved to complain about the New York Times, he added, when what they really needed was their own New York Times. The crowd jeered and booed at him.
Carlson’s evolution – from a clubbable conservative journalist who often criticized the kooks, extremists and blowhards of his own side, to a cautious Maga fellow-traveler, to an “America first” firebrand more radical than Donald Trump himself – is the subject of a new book, Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. The reporter Jason Zengerle tries to answer a question that, he notes, haunts any room where political journalists today gather: “What the hell happened to Tucker?”
Beside Carlson’s own works of memoir-reportage-polemic, the only previous book about him is an admiring 2023 biography by the conservative writer Chadwick Moore, described in a Guardian review as “meld[ing] hagiography to dictation”. Zengerle’s book, written without Carlson’s cooperation, is therefore the first to reckon critically with probably the most interesting, important, compelling and arguably dangerous media personality of the Trump age.
The book comes from Crooked Media Reads, a new publishing imprint created by former Barack Obama staffers, and Zengerle recently joined the staff of the liberal New Yorker. But he leaned on Carlson as a reporting source for many years, he writes, and liked him. Now he sees in Carlson a grim metaphor. The gap between the “gifted young writer” he knew in the late 1990s and the “noxious talking head” of today, he argues, “is the larger story of conservative politics and conservative media over the last 30 years”.
In 1999, Carlson referred to Trump as “the single most repulsive person on the planet” – and even more recently continued to say disparaging things about the president in private, as revealed by the 2021 Dominion lawsuit against Fox, which exposed embarrassing text messages illustrating the gap between Carlson’s public and private views. Yet as a Fox News host he came to endorse Trump’s agenda mostly wholeheartedly.
And since he was forced out of Fox in 2023, in disputed circumstances, he has leaned even further into a nativist, isolationist, far-right stance – talking up the authoritarian Russian regime, giving airtime to guests who have been accused of white nationalism, Holocaust revisionism, antisemitism and conspiracism, and suggesting that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Jewish president of Ukraine, is “sweaty and ratlike” and “a persecutor of Christians”.
The book focuses on Carlson’s adult career in TV news, though it does contain some fascinating biography about his early life. Most of the broad strokes are well known – Carlson himself has often discussed his childhood – though Zengerle uncovers some new detail and depth.
Carlson’s father, Dick Carlson, was an orphan from a hardscrabble and tragedy-filled background who became a pioneering newsman, diplomat, lobbyist and the director of Voice of America and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (Although Dick probably rubbed shoulders with the intelligence world, Zengerle is skeptical of a longstanding rumor that he was a CIA operative.)
Dick’s first wife and Tucker’s mother, a bohemian heiress, abandoned the family when Tucker was young. Years later, when she was dying in France, Tucker and his brother both declined to visit her; in her will, she left them each $1. Dick’s second wife, Tucker’s stepmother, was also an heiress – to the Swanson frozen food fortune – but a more supportive parent. Carlson was nannied by a former Korean intelligence officer, addressed as Colonel Kwon, and, as Michael Wolff has written, lost his virginity at 14 in a visit to a Nevada brothel arranged by his father.
After time as a class clown at a Swiss boarding school, an Episcopal prep school, Trinity College, and in Nicaragua – where he traveled during a summer break as a “wing-tipista” writer hoping to help the contras fighting the leftwing regime – Carlson entered Washington journalism. He was passionate about such writers as Hunter S Thompson, PJ O’Rourke, and Joan Didion, Zengerle says, and eager to follow his father’s footsteps.
When Carlson joined the fledgling (now defunct) Weekly Standard in 1995, the magazine was the flagship of the hawkish “neoconservative” wing of the Republican party. He quickly earned a reputation as a talented writer with a contrarian bent and an eye for humor and color. Yet he saw early that the future lay in cable news.
By the time Carlson delivered his provocative 2009 quasi-defense of the New York Times, however, he was near his career’s “lowest point”, Zengerle writes. A string of news and talkshow slots (at CNN, PBS, MSNBC) had flamed out. While Carlson’s friend and former MSNBC colleague, Rachel Maddow, ascended toward stardom, he had been reduced to doing Dancing With the Stars – and was the first contestant voted off.
The CPAC speech was a calculated effort to build buzz for a new venture, the Daily Caller, that he hoped might become that conservative New York Times. It did not. Carlson, who obsessively tracked the Caller’s web-traffic data, very quickly realized that people wanted something more like Breitbart: line-crossing, muckraking, anger-feeding. Over time he began hiring more aggressive and unscrupulous reporters – including four who were later exposed as holding neo-Nazi or far-right views. (Carlson has said he was not aware of their views.)
Carlson was also deeply ashamed over his one-time support for the Iraq war; he had been initially skeptical of the war, but set aside his reservations at the urging of pro-war neoconservatives he had believed to be smarter than himself. “Carlson was one of the first – and for many years, only – conservative pundits to recant his support for the Iraq war,” Zengerle writes.
Yet he remained angry at himself for having ignored his gut instincts, and angry at a conservative establishment he felt had misled him: “Carlson started to wonder what else these people were wrong about. And he started to wonder what the people he held in low regard” – like the rightwing isolationist Pat Buchanan, or Trump – “might be right about”.
When he joined Fox News he was also determined not to repeat the mistakes of his earlier, more staid and centrist, TV career. This time he would out-Fox Fox. And although he disliked Trump, he recognized earlier than other pundits that Trump’s oddball candidacy needed to be taken seriously.
His foresight was rewarded: in November 2016, Fox executives anxious to catch up to Trump gave Carlson his own show, Tucker Carlson Tonight. By July 2020, it was “the highest-rated program in US cable-news history”. Trump himself took to calling Carlson, daily, to give unsolicited feedback about his show. Unlike other Fox personalities, Carlson tried to maintain some professional distance, Zengerle writes – sometimes even declining to pick up when the president of the United States called.
That just made Trump keener. In fact, Zengerle reveals, Carlson “confided to multiple people” a fear that Trump, or an intelligence service, was recording these phone calls to use against him later. But Carlson realized that he did not need to talk directly to Trump to influence him, when the world’s most enthusiastic and powerful TV viewer already tuned into his show nightly. He began writing his show for “an audience of one”.
While Zengerle dissects Carlson’s media career with a shrewd scalpel, we learn less about him as a person. His alcoholism – he quit drinking in 2002, after a bottom where he drank two double-screwdrivers with breakfast – gets only a few sentences. We also learn little about his relationship with his brother, Buckley (not to be confused with his son, also Buckley) – an even more unfiltered, even harder-living Carlson whose profile on the right has been rising in recent months, and who is said by some to represent the angry pure id of the brothers.
Zengerle’s smart, well-written, and well-reported book also leaves unanswered three big questions. Unfortunately, these are also the most burning ones: why exactly was Carlson fired from Fox, in 2023, at the peak of his power? Will he run for president? And how earnestly does he hold his increasingly out-there views?
Zengerle isn’t quite sure about the first two. As for the third, “whether Carlson really believes the awful things that he says,” he argues, “matters less than that he says them at all”. That answer rings true, but also feels like a slight cop-out. Perhaps, in its evasiveness, it is fittingly Carlsonian.
Zengerle’s final moral judgment of Carlson – whose influence, despite leaving Fox, remains significant – is less ambiguous. He notes that when Carlson was younger he liked to joke about running into Joseph Sobran, a conservative writer drummed out of the movement for alleged racism and antisemitism, muttering to himself at a Denny’s.
“It is tempting to think that Carlson has … suffered the same fate as the man he once ridiculed,” Zengerle writes. “Except Carlson is not sitting in an empty restaurant booth. He has the ears of heads of state and billionaires. He is selling out basketball arenas and constantly streaming onto our phones. He has descended into madness, but he is speaking to millions.”
Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by Jason Zengerle is out 27 January from Crooked Media Reads
