Tucker Carlson hasn’t read the massive New York Times piece about himself and told Axios that he “of course won’t” be doing so.
Carlson, a run-of-the-mill neoconservative Republican turned-anti-interventionist, protectionist, and populist, trolled the NYT on Sunday by posting a selfie of himself holding the newspaper’s 20,000-word expose on him, dubbed “American Nationalist”, while wearing a big grin.
The Fox News personality, who hosts America’s most-watched cable news programme (averaging about 3.2 million nightly viewers), was slammed in the NYT piece for “weaponizing” viewers’ fears and grievances “to create what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news”.
The paper suggested that “Mr. Carlson has filled the vacuum left by Donald J. Trump, championing the former president’s most ardent followers and some of their most extreme views” on issues ranging from the Capitol riots and immigration to Black Lives Matter and COVID mandates. The paper suggested his “racism” is demonstrated through his discussion of America’s immigration crisis, and the insinuation that authorities may be deliberately boosting immigration from poor nations to boost Democrats’ election numbers.
NYT correspondent Nicholas Confessore, the author of the expose, said his research involved interviewing “dozens” of Carlson’s friends and former colleagues, and studying “more than 1,100 episodes of his Fox program”. Carlson himself did not speak to Confessore.
Asked by Axios to comment on one of the key claims made by the reporter - that he obsessively monitors ratings on a minute-by-minute basis, Carlson said he’d “never read the ratings a single day in [his] life” and doesn’t “even know how”.
“Most of the big positions I’ve taken in the past five years – against the neocons, the vax and the war [in Ukraine] – have been very unpopular with our audience at first”, he added.
In addition to being the top-rated prime time show among Republicans, Carlson’s programme is watched nightly by hundreds of thousands of Democrats and independents. A Nielson MRI Fusion report published in February found that in October 2021, "Tucker Carlson Tonight" ranked first among both Republicans and Democrats in the 25-54 age bracket coveted by advertisers.
Outpaced only by the Joe Rogan Experience, which averages 11 million viewers and listeners per episode, Carlson’s show also tops MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (2.2 million viewers) and far outranks CNN prime time (0.82 million average), according to Adweek.
The show has also apparently had a real-life impact outside the cable news bubble, with Donald Trump reportedly convinced by Carlson to call off planned US strikes inside Iran after the Islamic Republic shot down a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz in June 2019.