Column: Tucker Carlson's ludicrous falsehoods have no place in journalism

If you’re an opinion journalist, a cardinal sin is to express a view you really don’t believe — or stoop to fabrication. In short, blatantly lie.

It’s unforgivable — and potentially libelous.

I’m referring particularly to so-called journalists who sound off when they don’t believe their own words. They lower themselves just to be provocative, feed listeners what they want to ingest and build viewer ratings.

Someone like fired top-rated Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who trumpeted former President Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen when he apparently didn’t believe the claptrap himself. Some other Fox News stars fit into the same dark corner of deception and hypocrisy.

It all came out in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox for smearing the company’s reputation during 2020 post-election reporting. Fox settled the suit by paying out nearly $800 million to Dominion and issuing a statement conceding that it had aired falsehoods about the company.

Texts and emails collected in pretrial discovery showed that while Carlson boosted Trump on camera, he expressed disdain for him in private.

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote in one post-election text. “There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

It’s one thing for a politician to stretch the truth. But the nation’s founders inserted freedom of the press into the 1st Amendment for a reason: Journalists were regarded as essential to a democracy by keeping the public informed about what was happening around them and serving as an independent crosscheck on government.

When journalists lie — bellow falsehoods about rigged elections — it ultimately undermines the public’s confidence in not only journalism but also democracy itself.

And it can prod gullible people with fragile emotions into violence, as we saw when Trump worshipers stormed the U.S. Capitol trying to block certification of President Biden’s election.

Carlson promoted the ludicrous conspiracy theory that the insurrection was provoked by government agents.

It makes one wonder what other stands that the conservative TV host took were really fake views. Was all that race-baiting and immigrant-hating truly reflective of the showman backstage?

Does Carlson really believe the trash he has rolled out about his home state of California? Or was he just pandering to red state conservatives who loathe the left coast?

“California has gone from one of the richest places in the world to the poorest state in our country,” Carlson wrote in a 2020 Fox News op-ed.

That’s blatant nonsense. California is the world’s fifth-argest economy and projected soon to rise to fourth.

“Civilization itself is coming apart in San Francisco,” Carlson said on a 2020 TV show. “The jewel of our Pacific Coast is now filthier and more chaotic than downtown Mumbai, India.”

OK, the jewel does need some cleaning up, but it’s not that blemished.

Carlson, 53, was born in San Francisco in 1969.

His father, Dick Carlson, was a budding journalist who had gotten his start at the Los Angeles Times as a “copy boy.”

In 1963, he became a reporter for United Press International and for a while was a colleague of mine in the state Capitol bureau.

I remember Dick Carlson as an energetic young reporter who was always talking up some sensational expose he was working on. But I can’t recall him ever delivering.

Dick Carlson left UPI and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had a significant effect on California politics.

Baby Tucker’s dad co-wrote a 1969 Look magazine article claiming that San Francisco Mayor Joseph L. Alioto was linked to at least six mafia figures.

Alioto sued Look for libel and won a $350,000 judgment. The federal judge found that the “false and defamatory” allegations “were made with actual malice … with reckless disregard for their truth.”

But the article already had pretty much snuffed out Alioto’s political career. He finished a distant second to then-Secretary of State Jerry Brown in the 1974 Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Dick Carlson’s wife — Tucker’s mom — was a San Francisco socialite-artist, Lisa McNear Lombardi. The family moved to L.A., where Dick won several awards as an investigative TV reporter — and Lisa bolted to France, leaving two sons with their dad. Tucker was 6.

“She told me he was ‘by far the superior parent,’” recalls a close friend, Nancy Boyarsky, a fiction writer and wife of retired Times columnist Bill Boyarsky. “She said she was meant for more romantic things than he could offer. That was in the ‘70s. Women were leaving their husbands and kids to find themselves.”

“I bitterly hated her,” Tucker Carlson said in a 2019 podcast interview, calling his estranged mom a “nut case.”

“Our mother was not a fan of us,” he said on another podcast. “Obviously that hurts when you’re little. Then I realized you can’t control it. Your mother doesn’t like you. OK, boo-hoo.

“Criticism from people who hate me doesn’t really mean anything to me. I really don’t care.”

Dick Carlson became a news anchor and investigative reporter for a San Diego TV station. Then he quit journalism, calling it a “kid’s game” that was “insipid, sophomoric and superficial.” He cited as an example one of his own pieces that outed a local tennis player, Renee Richards, as a transgender woman.

Dick Carlson married a rich heiress, and Tucker grew up in opulence. Through Reagan administration connections, Dick became director of Voice of America.

Tucker Carlson embarked on his own journalism career — and he proved to be short on ethical standards.

We’re supposed to expose liars like Trump, not parrot them.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.