A New York Times report says that Fox News host Tucker Carlson trades intimate details with mainstream reporters when he’s not publicly denouncing 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).”
The report from Ben Smith says Carlson’s habits are an “open secret.” Smith trades messages with Carlson himself, and 16 other journalists all have said Carlson has been a source. Three of those journalists called him 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.”
Carlson has recently said that the FBI provoked the January 6 insurrection, and that children wearing masks is akin to child abuse.
But he says a lot less about the relationships he has with political and media reporters he claims are disgusting “animals.”
Some reporters suggest that Carlson’s practice is a defense against bad publicity.
“If you open yourself up as a resource to mainstream media reporters, you don’t even have to ask them to go soft on you,” said one journalist.
New York Times carries the full story.
Also at HuffPo
