How Tucker Carlson Became Right-Wing Media’s Most Significant Voice
Fresh Air
NPR
4.3 • 36.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
‘New Yorker’ staff writer Jason Zengerle says after Tucker Carlson was let go from CNN and MSNBC, and joined Fox News, Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy revived his career. “Those more prestigious Fox shows… they could not find camera-ready, intelligent human beings to go on their programs and make a sensible case for Donald Trump -- and Tucker was someone who could,” he tells Terry Gross. After Fox fired Carlson in 2023, he started his own streaming show and moved further to the right. Zengerle writes that Carlson’s story shows how conservative media has changed. His book is ‘Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.’
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| 0:00.0 | Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, |
| 0:07.4 | working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theshmit.org. |
| 0:14.6 | This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Tucker Carlson has become one of the most powerful, influential people on the right. |
| 0:22.7 | He got his start and conservative print media and transitioned to TV in the early days of cable |
| 0:28.0 | news. After he was let go from CNN and MSNBC, which is now MS now, and was on just one |
| 0:35.3 | episode of Dancing with the Stars, he got hired by Fox, but eventually |
| 0:39.9 | was fired. My guest Jason Zengarly writes, Carlson had the highest rated show in the history |
| 0:45.8 | of cable news, and when he was abruptly fired from Fox in 2023, it was widely assumed he would |
| 0:52.4 | fade from relevance. He did, for many Americans, especially liberals, but he didn't go away. |
| 0:58.8 | After leaving Fox News in 2023, he debuted a new streaming show on the social media platform, |
| 1:05.6 | then known as Twitter, now X, and launched the Tucker Carlson streaming network. |
| 1:12.2 | Zangeli writes, the people still paying attention to him now |
| 1:15.5 | are getting an even more extreme version of him |
| 1:18.5 | than the one they saw on Fox News. |
| 1:21.2 | Zangerly is the author of the new book about Carlson called |
| 1:24.4 | Hated by All the Right People, Tucker Carlsonson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind. |
| 1:30.8 | For several years, Zangarly wrote about politics for the New York Times Magazine. |
| 1:35.5 | At the end of 2025, he joined the New Yorker. |
| 1:38.7 | In the book, he writes, whether Carlson really believes the awful things that he says these days |
| 1:43.9 | matters less than that he says these days matters less than that he |
| 1:45.7 | says them at all, and that millions of people, members of Congress, titans of industry, the |
| 1:51.5 | president, and just everyday Americans, listen to and take their cues from him. |
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