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Fresh Air

How Tucker Carlson Became Right-Wing Media's Most Significant Voice

Fresh Air

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10 min
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Jason Zengerle, staff writer for The New Yorker, discusses Tucker Carlson's rise in conservative media. After Carlson was let go from CNN and MSNBC, he joined Fox News, where 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.