The Fall of Tucker Carlson, and the Making of Candace Owens

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Once a Beltway neoconservative, Tucker Carlson came to embody the angry, forgotten white man—railing at “the élites” and propagating racist conspiracy theories and the lie of the stolen election. “Unlike a lot of his colleagues at Fox News, he made news, he set the agenda,” Kelefa Sanneh, who wrote about Carlson in 2017, says. “People were wondering, What is Tucker going to be saying tonight?” Sanneh joins Andrew Marantz and David Remnick to discuss Carlson’s demise, and what comes next. And Clare Malone reports on Candace Owens, the powerful right-wing influencer and provocateur who’s set her sights on the future of right-wing media—and on a younger and more female audience than that of Fox News.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:13.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Brandy.
0:16.6	A couple of decades ago, a modestly talented writer of outsized ego named Tucker Carlson
0:23.1	appeared on the scene.
0:24.7	He was a bow tie wearing conservative, writing wise-ass profiles of George Bush and Hillary
0:31.4	Clinton and the like, but he became over time the voice of the aging, angry white man,
0:37.8	the voice of white nationalism and extremist politics.
0:41.4	His audience got so large that Tucker Carlson has been talked about as a presidential candidate,
0:47.2	a successor to Donald Trump.
0:49.7	When we saw his emails and his text messages disclosed in Fox's legal battle with dominion
0:55.0	voting systems, those messages made it plain that Carlson's citizen is even larger than
1:01.2	his ego or his ratings.
1:03.5	In private, he actually despised Donald Trump, hated him passionately, he said.
1:09.1	He expressed his stain for his bosses at Fox and talked about women in the most disgusting
1:14.6	terms.
1:16.0	His behavior hurt Fox's case with dominion and we assume that was a big factor in that
1:22.2	enormous financial settlement.
1:24.9	Last week it cost Carlson his perch at 8 p.m. on Fox and he was fired on Monday.
1:31.5	So what does this all mean for Fox News and for the brand of aggrieved right-wing politics
1:36.8	that Carlson most effectively championed?
1:40.1	I'm joined now by two colleagues who are staff writers here, Andrew Moran's follows
1:43.9	politics in the media very closely and Kellefessane wrote about Tucker Carlson in the New Yorker.
	...

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