Many moons ago, I thought well of Tucker Carlson. We occasionally jousted on CNN’s Crossfire, when I was a guest host. In those days, Carlson presented himself as a committed journalist. He played on the conservative field, but he insisted he prized accurate reporting. He told me his goal was to differentiate himself from many of the writers for right-wing media and not be seen as an ideological hack. And he demonstrated that with a profile he did of George W. Bush in 1999 for Tina Brown’s Talk magazine. The article was mostly positive about the Texas governor who was the GOP establishment’s choice for president. But it did portray Bush dropping loads of F-bombs and rudely mocking the pleas for mercy from Karla Faye Tucker, a Texas woman on death row whose execution Bush had refused to halt. That made Bush look like a real shit. In his syndicated column, George Will wrote, “Few will think more of Mr. Bush after reading the article.”

The Bush profile seemed to mark Carlson’s independence. The New Republic hailed Carlson's "gumption." And Democratic consultant Robert Shrum said, "His piece about Bush, intentionally or unintentionally, is one of the most revealing things written about the guy.” Bill Kristol, then the editor of the Weekly Standard, Carlson’s home base, remarked, "Some Republicans and conservatives think [Carlson’s] a fellow conservative and he'll give them a break. Tucker, to his credit, reports it like it is." At this stage in his career, Carlson noted that he wanted to make sure he would not be “written off as a wing nut." He explained to the Washington Post, “You try not to distort the truth because someone you're profiling you think is on the right side of abortion or trade or any other issue. That would be dishonest."

Doing television with Carlson in those days was enjoyable. He was not doctrinaire and had a chirpy contrarian streak. He was obviously ambitious (as was I) but not too full of himself, even with his silly bowtie affectation. After Princess Diana died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel while fleeing paparazzi, Carlson and I were guests on Crossfire. The subject at hand was the massive coverage of her death within the American media. We gently(!) agreed that the American obsession with the British royal family was odd, given our nation’s history. Bill Press and Patrick Buchanan, the co-hosts, each took exception to our respectfully expressed view. The phones lit up with people demanding Carlson and I be immediately defenestrated and urging more Princess Di coverage. I was told that no show in the history of CNN had ever received more calls of protest. I considered Carlson generally an honest journalist.

That was then. He went on to establish the Daily Caller, billing it as a right-wing answer to Huffington Post. But the site published misleading reports on climate change and articles by white supremacists. It has also put up numerous stories that turned out to be false and amplified right-wing conspiracy sites. It posted videos about NPR that were misleadingly edited. Its big scoop that a Democratic senator had paid two women for sex in the Dominican Republic unraveled, and the site never acknowledge that. It ran a story claiming a Chinese-owned company had hacked Hillary Clinton’s private email server when she was secretary of state and had obtained her emails. This was not true. It even posted a video that seemed to encourage people to drive cars into crowds of left-wing protesters. The site did not reflect the journalistic values Carlson had once claimed to cherish. And through all the Daily Caller’s controversies, Carlson vamped as a take-no-prisoners, bad-boy provocateur, defending his site and its many misfires and misdeeds. He now appeared to crave notoriety more than respect.

In 2009, Carlson joined Fox as a contributor and seven years later earned his own nightly show on the network of right-wing extremism, where he has behaved like a fascist (peddling January 6 conspiracy theories and promoting the baseless claim that the Biden administration is scheming to lock up conservatives), advanced white supremacist notions, and, most recently, become Vladimir Putin’s number-one defender in the United States. It was a long, strange trip that brought Carlson from the guy who maintained that a conservative could be a great reporter to a demagogue who pollutes the national discourse with paranoia, bigotry, and hate, and who boosts Donald Trump, a champion liar, an autocrat-wannabe, and a threat to a free press.

People ask me for an explanation of this transformation, and I am useless. About a year ago, I reached out to someone who decades previously worked quite closely with Carlson to see if he could provide any insights. He told me that he had no answers and had stopped trying to figure out this riddle. Trump is a person who was always a narcissistic and potentially dangerous jerk. That did not seem the case with Carlson. What happened? I do not know.

I’ve been reflecting on this because a few days ago I landed a good scoop about Carlson. I obtained memos the Kremlin had recently sent to Russian media outlets promoting talking points the Putin regime wished to see conveyed by Russian journalists. The memos said these were “recommendations,” but a natural question was whether they were really orders. One of these documents, dated March 3, stated that “it was essential” for Russian media to feature Carlson “as much as possible,” noting that he “sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally.” In other words, Carlson’s almost inexplicable anti-anti-Putinism was helpful for the Kremlin and should be fully exploited by Putin-friendly media, the only media left in Russia. As far as the Kremlin saw it, Carlson was on their side in contending that the war in Ukraine had been caused by the United States and NATO. These memos were pushing disinformation the Kremlin wanted published and broadcasted—including an allegation that the United States was waging “biogenocide” against Russians—and Carlson was the only Western journalist they cited. He was serving, as Lenin might have said, as a “useful idiot.” You can read the full story I posted here. It went viral.

Carlson and Fox News did not respond to my repeated requests for comment. But what could they say? Carlson is free to voice his opinion. And he is not responsible for how a dictatorial and murderous regime exploits it. But being deployed as ammo by a government that is brutally bombing civilian targets ought to give any decent person pause. At the least, the quotee in such a situation should denounce Moscow’s disinformation campaign and kindly request the Kremlin leave him or her out of it. That might be tough for Carlson, given that he has been such a prominent mouthpiece for Russian propaganda, even after Putin launched the invasion. Yet I believe in redemption and hope there’s a trace of the young Carlson within him that can find its way through all the muck and reach the surface. If that occurs following the publication of my article, it will certainly represent what we in the business call impact journalism.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

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The Watch, Read, and Listen List

Severance. Usually, I wait until I’ve watched a full season of a show before sharing my evaluation. It’s important to know if the creators can stick the landing. But I am going to break with standard operating procedure to advise you to watch Severance, the new Apple TV+ series. It’s billed as a thriller, but that does not do it justice. This is a wonderfully ingenious and imaginative piece of work. The premise, when I first heard it, seemed off-puttingly kooky. Through some high-tech medical procedure, people can have their memories cleaved into two sets: one covers what occurs when you are at work; the other contains your experiences out of the workplace. And never the twain shall meet. That is, when you’re chillaxing at home, you have no recollection of what occurred on the job, and vice versa. The kitschy pitch is, what if you could separate these two spheres of your life? Presto! No worries about the dreaded work-life balance. At the office, you are totally focused on, well, work. No distractions or anxieties. Off the clock, nothing hangs over you. But...it’s more complicated than that.

Severance follows a small group of workers for a mega-corporation who have gone through the procedure. All day long, they “refine” “microdata” at workstations in a fluorescent-lit subterranean, sterile office space. They have no recollection of what transpires in their “outie” lives or in any part of the world beyond this environment. No books, no newspapers, no television, no phones are allowed. It’s all work, all the time. Their “outies” have no idea what they are toiling on for Lumon Industries. And it’s not even clear—to them or us—what Lumon does or what their work produces. (They sort numbers on a screen all day, without being informed about what the numbers represent.) This mystery is compounded by an overall creepiness at Lumon, where the cultish corporate culture is based on the worship of the company’s founder and resembles Scientology. There’s also weird and (so far) unexplained animosity between the departments that is fueled by rumors of past bloody assaults.

The series—directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle—conjures up a small-scale dystopian universe, with its own language and set of rules. At least, we think it’s small. Who knows how far it reaches and what Lumon is up to? Adam Scott of Parks and Recreation and Big Little Lies plays Mark Scout, a Lumon worker who lost his wife in a car crash and sought the supposedly irreversible severance procedure so he can escape for at least eight hours a day the painful memories of her death. His co-workers include Irving and Dylan, each played superbly by, respectively, John Turturro and Zach Cherry. A newcomer to their pod is Helly (Britt Lower), who after one day desperately wants to quit. But her “outie” won’t let her. She is stuck in this hell. Patricia Arquette is delicious as the malevolent and colder-than-ice manager, who communicates with the ominous “board” and presumably knows the dark secrets of Lumon. Christopher Walken is the head of another department, who seems sweet on Irving and who may or may not be a devious plotter. Meanwhile, a former member of this group, Petey (Yul Vazquez), who disappeared one day, contacts Mark on the outside, tells him severance can be undone (though the side effects appear rather unpleasant and perhaps lethal), and signals that serious evil is underway at Lumon. Back at work, Mark, with no memory of Petey’s warning, starts to realize something wrong is afoot. As did HBO’s Westworld, Severance presents us a tech-jiggered world that raises questions about identity, memory, and free will. Its slow pace intensifies the menace and paranoia that power the narrative. The first episode is a fabulous setup that prompts a binderful of questions. And I curse Apple for not dumping all the episodes at once. I have no idea where the series is heading, but I want to remember it all.

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

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