Conservatives Have a Toxic Relationship with Tucker Carlson

AP Photo/Seth Wenig

Even as Tucker Carlson is pilloried for a string of damning revelations, his ratings remain strong.

That’s because for his viewers, each new denunciation is understood not just as a critique of the host, but of them and their values. Carlson’s not just a member of the team, but a valuable one who they see as willing to give voice to their worldview — torpedoes from the elites in academia, Hollywood, media, and politics be damned. With quite a lot of fodder from those entities and plenty of natural talent as a broadcaster, he’s secured their loyalty.

But has he earned it?

Conservatives are understandably immune to the usual spate of censures. When New York Times writer Nick Confessore published a critical profile of Carlson last year, I remarked that it would “ultimately serve no earthly purpose,” because Confessore had made no attempt to understand either Carlson or the people who respect and watch him. In Confessore’s telling, criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) constituted evidence of racial animus. The piece predictably landed with the Times’s audience, but certainly not Carlson’s.

What should move conservatives, though, is the mountain of evidence that Carlson has no allegiance to either the truth or the advancement of the principles they believe in.

Carlson isn’t a politician with aspirations for higher officer, and Fox has argued in court that Carlson is more an entertainer than a journalist. One consequence of those features is that he has no interest in maintaining accuracy in reporting or appealing to a majority of Republicans, much less a majority of the country.

He has one goal: keep a few million viewers — on average, 3.3 million a night in 2022 — enthralled by his show.

There are no deliverables attached to that mission, and no policy objectives that must be reached in order to keep viewers coming back for more. Carlson himself can’t accomplish much of anything on his own and he arguably benefits from a Republican Party that struggles either electorally or to effect change. Much of his brand, after all, has been built on insisting that conservative voters have been betrayed by conservative officials.

His own actions would seem to support the theory that he believes conservative failures — or at least the appearance of such failures — to be to his advantage. Consider that in June 2020, Carlson made a special effort to bring attention to the supposed failings of “conservative leaders” who “dithered” as violent riots broke out in a number of major cities. In the process, he unleashed a series of misleading broadsides of the kind that conservatives in the arena are used to weathering from the likes of the Times and MSNBC.

“On Friday, as American cities were being destroyed by mobs, the vice president [of the] United States refused to say anything specific about the riots we were watching on television. Instead, Mike Pence scolded America for its racism,” said Carlson. Here’s what Pence actually said:

We have no tolerance for racism in America. We have no tolerance for violence inspired by racism in America. And as President Trump said, justice will be served.

Now, while we also believe in law and order in this country, and we — while we condemn violence against property or persons, we — we will also always stand for the right of Americans to peacefully protest and let their voice be heard.

Former Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James also came under fire for penning a Fox News op-ed in which Carlson alleged she had panned America as “irredeemably racist” and argued that its citizens deserved the riots that had befallen them. And yet neither of those claims can be reached by those who actually deigned to read the op-ed.

“While I understand the frustration and anger, I do not condone the violence spreading across this country in response to [George] Floyd’s horrific killing. Rioting tearing apart Minneapolis and cities coast-to-coast will never lead to anything but more suffering,” wrote James. “There is no other country like ours in the world – nothing compares to its greatness.”

That’s hardly the indictment of America or its people that Carlson describes.

This chronic dishonesty extends into myriad other subjects, and often has the consequences of making the real lives of Americans worse.

Many conservative objections to the US response to Covid were ultimately vindicated. Years-long mask mandates and school closures proved ineffectual and in many instances injurious. And yet, when a Republican administration developed effective vaccines to combat the virus, Carlson not only spread doubt about safety, but did so in the laziest way imaginable.

“Why are Americans being discouraged from asking simple straightforward questions about it, questions like: How effective are these drugs? Are they safe?” asked Carlson. “What’s the miscarriage risk for pregnant women, for example? Is there a study on that? May we see it? And by the way, how much are the drug companies making off this stuff?”

Of course, there were reassuring answers to these questions that Carlson could have provided to the benefit of his audience. Instead, though, he elected to tell them that “the most powerful people in America” were “lying” about the vaccines. Carlson alone can’t be blamed for the lower vaccination rates in southern states and higher death rates that result from those rates, but his lazy entry into the subject, followed by repeated nod-along “interviews” of outright anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson, contributed to the problem.

How else has he demonstrated his disdain for the Americans whose trust in him has rendered him fabulously wealthy?

In private, Carlson called Trump a “demonic force” on January 6, 2021. Yet he refrained from blaming Trump during his monologue that night, instead urging viewers to consider the root causes of the day’s events. Even to this very day, Carlson uses his massive platform to make excuses for Trump’s destructive lies. “It is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy,” said Carlson last week, “No honest person can deny it.”

He introduced an interview with Kanye West by dismissing the idea that West was crazy and insisting that “we’ve rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes.” Later, it was revealed that Carlson had edited out the most bizarre and overtly anti-Semitic parts of their conversation.

And in another instance, he called for reporter Jacqui Heinrich to be fired because he believed Fox’s audience to be so incapable of handling the truth, that a single fact-check of an erroneous claim about the election could tank the company’s ratings and stock price.

Tucker Carlson goes easy on people he privately believes to be detrimental to the conservative movement and publicly smears those who represent it well. He shields viewers form the truth about  important subjects such as the sanctity of our democracy and safety of life-saving medicines. He wants those who don’t to lose their livelihoods.

None of these are critiques from his left flank, they’re verifiable facts demonstrating that Tucker’s relationship with his audience is parasitic, and for him serves the singular goal of preserving his rather cushy gig at Fox.

Conservatives long for powerful allies in the media, and are thus eager to trust and delight in those who present themselves as their champion. But in search of real friends, they must identify those who tell the truth. And for all of Carlson’s prodigious talent, he has proven himself unwilling or incapable of doing so.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.