The NY Times does a piece on the Fox Host that plays MANY roles in and for the media….
New get in on a little media secret that won’t be anymore….
It may give you a pause about media reporting….
But?
Anyone that actually follows the media will just smile…..
Some of us have been on to the herd journalism thing and the fact that a headline sells , and media companies ALSO have stock holders….
And the media lives on leaks and inside information, something , political leaders hate if it isn’t THEM leaking….
Carlson ,it seems, is a master at gaming the system….
A system that relies on him for all points of the media spectrum …
And if you are a Tucker Carlson viewer, you may also be asking: How can the guy who tells you every night that the media is lying be texting with the enemy?
The answer is one of Washington’s open secrets. Mr. Carlson, a proud traitor to the elite political class, spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them. He’s the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr. Carlson himself). I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him. But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, “a great source.”
“In Trump’s Washington, Tucker Carlson is a primary supersecret source,” the media writer and Trump chronicler Michael Wolff writes in his forthcoming collection of essays, “Too Famous.” Mr. Wolff, who thanked Mr. Carlson in the acknowledgments of his 2018 book, “Fire and Fury,” explained, “I know this because I know what he has told me, and I can track his exquisite, too-good-not-to-be-true gossip through unsourced reports and as it often emerges into accepted wisdom.”
Mr. Carlson was particularly well positioned to be a source about the Trump administration. His Fox platform, where in May he had a nightly average of three million viewers, made him someone who mattered to Mr. Trump, a close follower of television ratings. He has a former reporter’s eye for detail and anecdote, and his observations can be detected in the lurid tales of Mr. Trump’s chaotic court and Fox’s own tumultuous internal politics.
A coming book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” includes a moment in which Mr. Carlson sends Mr. Trump’s calls to voice mail after the first presidential debate last fall, when he was criticized for repeatedly interrupting Joe Biden. When Mr. Trump finally reaches the Fox host, the book describes, verbatim, an exchange between the two men that casts Mr. Carlson in a flattering light. (“Everyone says I did a good job,” Mr. Trump tells Mr. Carlson. “I don’t know who told you that was good,” Mr. Carlson says. “It was not good.”) Mr. Bender declined to comment on the sourcing that allowed him to so precisely reconstruct a conversation only two people were privy to….
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Mr. Carlson was born to a world of insiders and story shapers, and makes no secret of it….
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Mr. Carlson spends less time on air talking about his warm relationships with a generation of political and media reporters. To be fair, they don’t brag much about talking to him either. Right-wingers may not want their champion chattering with the lamestream media. And how do readers of news outlets like this one process the reality that reporters’ jobs include developing relationships with people they may despise?…
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The double game isn’t new to Mr. Carlson’s strain of American right-wing populism. In the 1950s, “no politician in America understood better than Joe McCarthy how the press worked and how to manipulate it,” the McCarthy biographer Larry Tye wrote in his 2020 book “Demagogue.” Mr. Trump, too, excelled at it. His exchange of access for favorable coverage prompted the great New York City columnist Jimmy Breslin to write in 1991 that “the guy was buying the whole news industry with a return phone call.”
image….MarketWatch/Fox
Carlson will probably just deny that he’s a”source” and his audience ,almost all dedicated Trumpites ,will believe him.
Just Lie
It always works for Trump.
According to Nixon-G.W. Bush-Obama-Trump criteria, Tucker Carlson would fully and clearly merit a full covert and overt national-security investigation for leaks (together with spying on every Christmas card he’s sent since 1970, if he was alive that far back).
I would guess Trump’s DOJ wasn’t looking at Carlson’s stuff under the cover?
He is trading gossip with mainstream media types, I wonder if anyone recorded the conversations, my guess they did.
Imagine this guy could be a leading candidate for the GQP nomination. Proving they have learned nothing. But hey, don’t forget that leakage.
And, for the record, I have never found Jack rude, even when he is disagreeing with me. He’s usually spot on.