Tucker Carlson

• 1. Introduction

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  Tucker Carlson ended his Friday broadcast on the 21st of April 2023 by telling Fox News viewers that he would "be back on Monday." He was not. On the morning of the 24th of April, the network dismissed him, along with the executive producer of his evening show. By every account, he had been given no warning.

  At the time, his program was among the most watched on American cable television, and he had spent years at the center of the country's political arguments. Yet his path to that chair was strange. It ran through magazines, a failed prime-time debate show, a reality dance contest and a website he helped found.

  How does a man with a modest college record and a family history of sudden departures become one of the most influential voices in conservative media? Why did a network that profited from him decide to cut him loose? And what does a commentator do when the audience follows him but the institutions around him do not? This documentary follows Carlson from a childhood marked by absence to a career defined by reinvention, and to the political allies who eventually turned on him.

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• 2. A Boy in La Jolla

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  When Tucker Carlson was six years old, his mother left the family and moved to France, and he and his brother never saw her again. He had been born at the Children's Hospital in San Francisco on the 16th of May 1969. His mother, Lisa McNear, was an artist from the city. His parents divorced in 1976, after a nine-year marriage that reportedly turned sour, and his father won custody of both boys.

  That father, Dick Carlson, had an unusual story of his own. His teenage parents had placed him in The Home for Little Wanderers orphanage. At the age of two he was adopted by a New England couple, and the husband was an executive at the Winslow Brothers and Smith Tannery of Norwood, described as the oldest tannery in America. Dick grew up to be a self-described gonzo reporter, then director of Voice of America, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and ambassador to the Seychelles.

  He raised his sons in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. Tucker attended La Jolla Country Day School, and the family home looked out over the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club. In 1984 his father ran for mayor of San Diego against the Republican incumbent Roger Hedgecock and lost.

  In 1979 Dick married Patricia Caroline Swanson, an heiress to the Swanson food business. Her family had sold the brand to the Campbell Soup Company in 1955, but she remained a beneficiary of the family fortune. She legally adopted Tucker and his younger brother Buckley. The family tree also included Henry Miller, known as the Cattle King, on his mother's side.

  Schooling did not go smoothly. Carlson was briefly enrolled at Collège du Léman, a boarding school near Geneva, but says he was "kicked out." He finished secondary school at St. George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island. There he began dating Susan Andrews, the headmaster's daughter, who later became his wife.

  At Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he finished four years with a grade point average of 1.9 and did not graduate with his class. His degree arrived in absentia, with the class of 1992. His yearbook listed him as a member of the "Dan White Society," an apparent reference to the man who murdered San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk.

  After college he applied to the Central Intelligence Agency and was rejected. His father then offered the advice that pointed him toward a newsroom: in journalism, "they'll take anybody."

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• 3. Bylines and Bow Ties

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  Carlson's first journalism job was as a fact-checker at Policy Review, a conservative journal then published by the Heritage Foundation and later taken over by the Hoover Institution. He moved on to write opinion pieces for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock. In 1995 he joined the news magazine The Weekly Standard. He pursued that job, he has said, because he feared being "written off as a wing nut" if he went to The American Spectator instead.

  In 1999 he interviewed the Texas governor George W. Bush for Talk magazine. Carlson quoted Bush mocking Karla Faye Tucker, a woman Texas had executed, and swearing frequently. The piece produced bad publicity for Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. Bush said Carlson had "misread, mischaracterized me" and had misunderstood how seriously he took the death penalty. The Democratic consultant Bob Shrum called the profile "vivid." Carlson recalled that he had expected to be mocked for writing a puffy piece, and that his wife had warned him people would think he was angling for a job with the Bush campaign.

  His byline spread widely. He wrote columns for New York magazine and Reader's Digest, and pieces for Esquire, Slate, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Daily Beast and The Wall Street Journal. Looking back, John F. Harris of Politico observed that in this period Carlson was viewed as an important voice of the intelligentsia.

  Reporting could also be dangerous. On the 17th of October 2001, while he was working on a New York magazine story about the Taliban, the plane carrying Carlson and his father crashed as it landed on a runway in Dubai. In 2003 his Esquire profile of a trip to Liberia with the Reverend Al Sharpton and other activists earned a nomination at the National Magazine Awards.

  That same year, in September, Warner Books published his memoir of cable news, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites. Publishers Weekly and the Washingtonian both praised its humor.

  Throughout these years he dressed in a signature style. He had worn bow ties since boarding school, and he kept wearing them on air until 2006.

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• 4. Crossfire and Its Aftermath

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  In October 2004, the comedian Jon Stewart walked onto the set of CNN's Crossfire, supposedly to promote his book America (The Book), and instead denounced the show itself. Stewart said it hurt political discourse in the United States, and he singled out Carlson for criticism. Carlson answered that Stewart was biased toward the left.

  The broadcast had a quieter coda. Carlson and his co-host Paul Begala later recalled that Stewart and Ben Karlin, one of the book's co-authors, stayed at CNN for more than an hour afterward to talk it through. Carlson called it heartfelt and said Stewart needed to do it. In 2017 The New York Times described the on-air dressing-down as an ignominious moment in Carlson's career. The Atlantic suggested it started the process by which he remade himself.

  How he arrived on that set matters too. In 2000 he had co-hosted a short-lived CNN program called The Spin Room. In 2001 he became a co-host of Crossfire, representing the right on alternating nights with Robert Novak, while James Carville and Begala spoke for the left. In 2003 his interview with Britney Spears, in which she said Americans should just trust the president in every decision, appeared in the film Fahrenheit 9/11.

  On the 5th of January 2005, the CNN chief Jonathan Klein told Carlson the network would not renew his contract, and CNN soon cancelled Crossfire. Carlson has said he resigned in April 2004, months before Stewart appeared, because he disliked the partisanship and found the debates pointless.

  Carlson was also working for public television at the time. He was hired in November 2003 to host Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered on PBS, which premiered on the 18th of June 2004. The New Yorker called it part of an effort to push PBS further to the right. On the 12th of June 2005 he announced he was leaving, even though the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had funded another season. He called PBS one of the "least bad" examples of government spending he disliked, but still "problematic."

  The next day, the 13th of June 2005, his early evening show premiered on MSNBC as The Situation with Tucker Carlson, later retitled Tucker. Rachel Maddow and Jay Severin appeared on a rotating panel. He hosted a late-afternoon wrap-up during the 2006 Winter Olympics and reported on the Virginia Tech and Johnson Space Center shootings in 2007.

  In between, he entered season 3 of Dancing with the Stars in 2006, paired with the professional dancer Elena Grinenko. He took ballroom lessons for four hours a day. He said he accepted the invitation because he rarely did things he was bad at, and he was "psyched" to try. On the 13th of September 2006, he became the first contestant eliminated. He also appeared as himself on 30 Rock, The King of Queens and the 2008 film Swing Vote.

  MSNBC canceled Tucker on the 10th of March 2008 over low ratings, and the last episode aired on the 14th. Brian Stelter noted in The New York Times that the evening lineup had drifted left during Carlson's tenure, with Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow taking his former slots. Carlson said the network "didn't have a role for me." He stayed on as a senior campaign correspondent for the 2008 election.

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• 5. The Caller

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  On the 11th of January 2010, Carlson and Neil Patel launched a political news website called The Daily Caller. Patel was a former aide to Dick Cheney and Carlson's former college roommate. The conservative activist Foster Friess funded it. Within a month, the site had joined the White House rotating press pool.

  The office culture was famously loose. Carlson reportedly offered free junk food and an unmonitored keg, installed a ping pong table, and let staff sleep under their desks. He told interviewers that the site would not be tied to ideology, saying "We're not enforcing any kind of ideological orthodoxy on anyone." The columnist Mickey Kaus quit after Carlson declined to run a column critical of Fox News coverage of the immigration debate, citing his contractual obligations to Fox.

  In June 2010 the site published excerpts of emails from JournoList, an invitation-only liberal forum of several hundred journalists, academics and policy experts that Ezra Klein had launched in 2007. Carlson had asked to join on the 25th of May 2010 and was turned down. Klein offered to build a bipartisan forum with him, and Carlson declined. Daily Caller staff later impersonated an editor of the Arkansas Times to gain access.

  The leaked emails, Carlson said, showed efforts to craft talking points to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama. They also included remarks by Dave Weigel of The Washington Post wishing for the death of Rush Limbaugh. The Post considered those remarks untenable, and Weigel resigned.

  Not every project earned praise. In February 2012 the site ran an investigative series, co-authored by Carlson, on the liberal watchdog Media Matters and its founder David Brock. Jack Shafer, a libertarian media critic at Reuters, said he had never thought much of Media Matters, but he blasted the piece for relying on conjecture and anonymously sourced material.

  In June 2017 the Center for Media and Democracy said the Trump campaign had paid The Daily Caller $150,000 for its subscriber list and emailed those subscribers at least 25 times. The watchdog said Carlson had a conflict of interest. In June 2020, Carlson sold his one-third stake to Patel for an undisclosed sum. He explained, "Neil runs it. I wasn't adding anything. So we made it official."

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• 6. Prime Time at Fox

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  The premiere of Tucker Carlson Tonight on the 14th of November 2016 drew 3.7 million viewers, making it the network's most watched telecast of the year in that time slot. It replaced On the Record. But Carlson had been at Fox News for years already. The network announced his hiring as a contributor in May 2009.

  He sat on the late-night satire show Red Eye, appeared on the All-Star Panel of Special Report, and substituted for Sean Hannity. In September 2010 he produced a special called Fighting for Our Children's Minds. In October 2012, on the eve of Barack Obama's first debate with Mitt Romney, Carlson publicized a 2007 video of Obama criticizing the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and praising Reverend Jeremiah Wright. An anonymous seller using the name "Sore Throwt" had been shopping the tape for a week. In April 2013 he replaced Dave Briggs as a co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend.

  The prime-time show climbed fast. On the 9th of January 2017 it moved to 9:00 p.m., replacing Megyn Kelly after she left. After The O'Reilly Factor was cancelled, it moved to 8:00 p.m. on the 19th of April 2017. Forbes reported that it averaged 2.8 million viewers per night. By October 2018 it was second in prime time, behind Hannity, with 3.2 million nightly viewers.

  Controversy followed. By the end of 2018, at least 20 advertisers had begun boycotting the show after Carlson said immigration made the country "poorer, dirtier and more divided." Fox News said the advertisers simply moved their ad buys to other programs. In November 2018, a local anti-fascist group protested outside his Washington home. Carlson was not there. He alleged someone cracked the front door, but police and the Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple saw no damage.

  By January 2019 the show had slipped to third, with 2.8 million viewers, and it had lost at least 26 advertisers. In March 2019, Media Matters resurfaced remarks Carlson had made on the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show about women and other groups, which led to calls for his firing. His ratings rose eight percent that week.

  A lawsuit pushed the question of truth into court. In December 2019 the model Karen McDougal sued Fox after Carlson accused her on air of extorting Donald Trump. In September 2020, Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil dismissed the case. She agreed with Fox that reasonable viewers would approach Carlson's statements with skepticism, because he often engages in exaggeration and non-literal commentary.

  Then came the peak. In the week of the 8th to the 14th of June 2020, Tucker Carlson Tonight became the highest-rated cable news show in the country, with an average of four million viewers. This followed his remarks on Black Lives Matter, which led Disney, T-Mobile and Papa John's to pull advertising. In July 2020, his head writer Blake Neff resigned after CNN Business reported he had posted racist, sexist and homophobic remarks under a pseudonym on the message board AutoAdmit. By October 2020, the show averaged 5.3 million viewers, the highest monthly average in cable news history to that point.

  His book career rose with the ratings. In May 2017, represented by the agency Javelin, he signed an eight-figure, two-book deal with Threshold Editions, the conservative imprint of Simon and Schuster. Ship of Fools debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in October 2018. The Long Slide followed in August 2021.

  By February 2021, Fox had also signed him to a multiyear deal for a weekly podcast and monthly specials called Tucker Carlson Originals on its streaming service, Fox Nation. A show called Tucker Carlson Today followed that spring.

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• 7. Life After Fox

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  Why Fox News fired Carlson has never been officially explained. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Rupert Murdoch was responsible, citing a pending lawsuit from the former producer Abby Grossberg and Carlson's coverage of the January 6 Capitol attack. In 2021, Carlson was also among the hosts named in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox for broadcasting false claims about its machines.

  The Wall Street Journal reported instead that private messages in which he criticized Fox management in vulgar language were the cause. The New York Times reported that in one message he criticized three Trump supporters beating an antifa activist, writing "It's not how white men fight." Fox hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz to investigate less than a week before the firing. The Washington Post wrote that Lachlan Murdoch and the Fox chief executive Suzanne Scott made the decision. Fox was reported to have a stockpile of damaging material, which the network denied.

  Carlson answered on the 26th of April with a video tweet that millions watched. On the 9th of May 2023 he announced he would relaunch his show on Twitter. His lawyers had just written to Fox executives, alleging that Rupert Murdoch and others had intentionally broken promises and that the breach should free him from his non-compete clause. Fox reportedly sent a cease and desist letter after the first episode.

  Tucker on Twitter debuted on the 6th of June 2023 and ran just over ten minutes. In it, Carlson claimed that the United States had recovered an extraterrestrial starship and its pilot, that Ukrainian forces had destroyed the Kakhovka Dam, and that the truth about the September 11 attacks was still classified. He also called Volodymyr Zelensky "sweaty and rat-like." The source material describes these as claims made in the episode.

  On the 23rd of August 2023, he interviewed Donald Trump on Tucker on X, deliberately timed to compete with the first Republican debate of the 2024 cycle. On the 6th of September 2023, he interviewed Larry Sinclair, a man with a criminal record largely for deceit crimes, who claimed to have had a night of crack cocaine-fueled sex with Barack Obama. Many criticized the interview, including X owner Elon Musk.

  The business grew around him. In October 2023 the venture firm 1789 Capital announced an investment in his new media company, and its founder Omeed Malik called it one of the firm's first investments. In December Carlson launched the Tucker Carlson Network, a streaming service with ad-supported and subscription content. It was first planned for Twitter, but Musk's company could not deliver the needed technology. His former Fox executive producer Justin Wells oversees programming. A biography titled Tucker, written by Chadwick Moore with more than 100 hours of interviews, sold just over 3,000 copies in its first week.

  In February 2024, Carlson traveled to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin. It was Putin's first one-on-one interview with a Western journalist since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Carlson said no Western journalist had bothered to interview the Russian leader. Many reporters replied that they had repeatedly been refused, and some had been expelled. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Carlson got access because his position was "not pro-Russian, not pro-Ukrainian, it's pro-American."

  Independent Russian journalists pointed out that at least 1,000 colleagues had fled new censorship laws, and that two American journalists, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, sat in Russian prison. Carlson raised their cases in the interview. Both were released on the 1st of August 2024 in a prisoner exchange, along with Paul Whelan. Days after the interview, the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison. Carlson drew fresh criticism for his interview, and for saying that "leadership requires killing people." He called Navalny's death "barbaric and awful."

  In May 2024, he launched the weekly podcast The Tucker Carlson Show. Slate wrote at its launch that his popularity had diminished, but the show soon ranked among the top political podcasts and was number one on Spotify in July 2024.

  Controversy kept pace. On the 2nd of September 2024, Carlson hosted the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill the chief villain of World War II and falsely claimed the Nazis did not intentionally carry out the Holocaust. Carlson did not correct him. All 24 Democratic Jewish members of Congress issued a joint statement, and the Republican congressman Mike Lawler also condemned the episode. On the 28th of October 2025, he hosted the white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts defended the invitation, and Republicans including Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell condemned that defense.

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• 8. Changing Convictions

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  On the 29th of November 1999, in a public exchange with Evan Smith of Texas Monthly, Carlson wrote that Donald Trump was "the single most repulsive person on the planet." He called the Reform Party, then Trump's vehicle, "a bunch of wackos." Few of his later fans would have guessed it.

  That Carlson was a very different political figure. He voted for George W. Bush in 2000 but did not vote in 2004, citing the Iraq War and his disillusionment with the Republican Party. He had backed the war at first. A year after the invasion, he told The New York Observer it was "a total nightmare and disaster" and that he was "ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it."

  He was also a libertarian. He supported Ron Paul's 1988 and 2008 campaigns, and in 2004 said he hated nanny-state regulations like seat belt laws. From 2009 through 2015 he was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. In 2008 he was reportedly floated as a possible Libertarian nominee. He was registered as a Democrat in Washington from 2006 to 2020, which he later said was to vote in mayoral primaries.

  The turn came gradually. In January 2016 he wrote in Politico in support of Trump's candidacy, including the proposed "Muslim ban." Politico later described him as perhaps the highest-profile proponent of Trumpism. Starting in 2018, he attacked libertarianism, saying "market capitalism is not a religion." He criticized hedge funds and private equity, including Bain Capital, where Mitt Romney was once CEO. He also called Elizabeth Warren's book The Two Income Trap one of the best he had read on economics.

  His influence over Trump was reported to be real. The New York Times reported that in June 2019 he helped talk Trump out of striking Iran after an American drone was shot down, reportedly warning that doing so would cost him re-election. That year he lobbied Trump to fire national security advisor John Bolton, calling him "demented," and Trump fired Bolton on the 10th of September 2019. In 2022 he privately persuaded Trump to endorse JD Vance in the Ohio Senate primary.

  Yet private doubts surfaced. In private correspondence, Carlson called Trump a "demonic force" and wrote, "I hate him passionately." After the 2020 election, he reportedly told people he had voted for Kanye West, though Politico said it was unclear whether he was joking.

  His stance on Russia also shifted. In the 2000s he had agreed that Russia was becoming a police state and that Putin was in league with America's enemies. In 2019, discussing aid to Ukraine, he said, "Why shouldn't I root for Russia? Which I am." He later claimed to be joking. Mother Jones reported that the Kremlin told state media it was essential to use Carlson clips as much as possible.

  The break with Trump came over Iran. On the 2nd of March 2026, Trump declared in a phone interview that Carlson and Megyn Kelly "aren't MAGA." On the 5th of March, he told ABC News's Jonathan Karl, "Tucker has lost his way." Carlson replied that there were times he was annoyed with Trump, but "I'll always love him no matter what he says about me." On the 18th of March, former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent appeared on his show, one day after resigning from the administration.

  On the 20th of April 2026, Carlson and his brother Buckley expressed regret for supporting the president. Tucker said, "I want to say I'm sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional." He added that they would be "tormented by it for a long time."

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