“Ask Tucker Carlson whatever happened to Tucker Carlson,” writes Lyz Lenz for the Columbia Journalism Review, “and he gets upset.”
Hmm. I guess some rich, white, male, conservative television hosts just don’t like being pigeonholed and belittled.
Lenz’s profile, entitled, “The mystery of Tucker Carlson,” details Carlson’s descent from apparent good guy — that is, a journalist once working for CNN and MSNBC and writing articles that sometimes skewer Republicans — to racist bad guy with 2.7 million viewers on Fox News and a conservative position on immigration.
On CNN’s Reliable Sources, however, Lenz offers, “If you look at a lot of his early writings . . . there has always been kind of a latent racism.” Evidence for this? She dredges up this confession from Carlson’s past: “The idea that I’d be responsible for the sins (or, for that matter, share in the glory of the accomplishments) of dead people who happened to share my skin tone has always confused me.”
Readers learn that Carlson is “worth over $8 million” and stands to inherit even more because his step mom is “Patricia Swanson of the Swanson frozen dinner fortune.” Lenz, in old-fashioned “New Journalism” style,* contrasts that with her own struggle as “a single mom, a freelance writer with two kids, swiftly facing a future with no health care.”
Lenz is divorcing her husband of 12 years, who is . . . [gut-punch] . . . a Republican. Their split “didn’t come because of the election,” she says, though “the election certainly revealed a lot of huge problems that we couldn’t overcome.”
Just as Tucker Carlson cannot understand his responsibility for all Caucasoid sins, he probably doesn’t see how her divorce is in any way relevant, either.
Racist!
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Lenz acknowledges that journalists are “not supposed to make it about ourselves,” but does anyway. CNN Money describes this as “daring,”
