Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is key source for media he ‘hates’, columnist says

Tucker Carlson of Fox News is a “go-to source” for the US political media he claims to “hate” and has called “cowards” and “cringing animals not worthy of respect” – according to a columnist for the New York Times.

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Ben Smith, a former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, outed Carlson as “the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr Carlson himself)”.

Carlson has become a star of the pro-Trump right – even figuring in polls regarding the next Republican presidential nomination, although he told a podcast last week he will not run – and a hate figure on the US left.

Referring to Carlson’s role stoking culture wars over Covid-19, Smith wrote that he dodged the question of whether he has been vaccinated himself.

Carlson reportedly replied: “When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position? … We can trade intimate details.”

Smith wrote: “Then we argued back and forth about vaccines and he ended the conversation with a friendly invitation to return to his show.”

Smith also quoted a leading recycler of Washington gossip, Michael Wolff, who has written two Trumpworld tell-alls and last week announced a third.

“In Trump’s Washington, Tucker Carlson is a primary supersecret source,” Smith quoted Wolff as writing in a new book of essays. “I know this because I know what he has told me, and I can track his exquisite, too-good-not-to-be-true gossip through unsourced reports and as it often emerges into accepted wisdom.”

Smith also quoted a heavily trailed book by Michael Bender, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, entitled Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.

According to Smith, Bender recounts a call between Trump and Carlson after the first debate last year, when Trump interrupted and hectored Joe Biden. Carlson is shown letting Trump go to voicemail, then telling him he did not do a good job onstage.

“Mr Bender declined to comment on the sourcing that allowed him to so precisely reconstruct a conversation only two people were privy to,” Smith wrote.

According to publicity material, Bender spoke to Trump. So have many other authors. Jonathan Karl of ABC News, author of Front Row at the Trump Show, told Axios on Monday: “If you thought there was no more to know, it’s been mind-blowing.”

Brian Stelter of CNN, author of Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of the Truth, told Smith “you can see Tucker’s fingerprints all over the hardcover”.

But in a week when Carlson pushed conspiracy theories about the 6 January attack on the Capitol, Stelter told Smith they had not spoken for his paperback.

Carlson called mainstream US reporters “animals” and “cowards” in April.

“I just can’t overstate how disgusted I am,” he told Outkick, “not simply by the details of the lying of the medium, but disgusted by the emphasis. The media is basically Praetorian Guard for the ruling class … I really hate them for it, I’ll be honest.”

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Detailing the collapse of Times and Politico stories critical of Carlson under attack from the host, Smith compared Carlson to Trump and Joe McCarthy. The senator from Wisconsin fueled anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s and was recently the subject of a biography entitled Demagogue.

Carlson told Smith: “I don’t know any gossip.”

But Smith said he spoke to 16 journalists from publications other than the Times.

One “reporter for a prominent publication who speaks to Mr Carlson regularly” said: “It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides.”

Another said: “If you open yourself up as a resource to mainstream media reporters, you don’t even have to ask them to go soft on you.”

Smith said he would not reveal the contents of his own off-record chats with Carlson.