Fox News’ dismissal of top-rated host Tucker Carlson sent shock waves through mainstream and conservative media this week. But nowhere was Carlson’s loss felt more than on the fringe and right-wing websites and forums where so many of his narratives originated.
On web shows and message boards, creators of hate and conspiracy theory content bemoaned the loss of Carlson and their path to a mainstream audience.
“He amplified [my] reporting more than anyone else,” Darren Beattie, a blogger and purveyor of conspiracy theories related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, said Monday on a web show hosted by Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk.
“He was basically the only person on Fox who would dare to have me on, and I’m not the only case,” Beattie said. “There are other people, and nobody would dare let them on any other Fox show. But Tucker would have them on to say things that you won’t hear anywhere on American TV.”
Carlson’s relationship to fringe figures on the far right was, in some ways, symbiotic. He would use his platform to attack institutions and people, unleashing a troll army drawn from the very ranks of the fringe right-wingers and 4Chan users who loved him — something the authors of this article have experienced on several occasions.
Steve Bannon, a former top Trump aide who appeared Tuesday on Kirk’s show, said the “power of Tucker Carlson” was his ability to distill and package fringe political ideas to a new audience. Bannon said Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the father and son who oversee Fox News’ parent company, fired Carlson to keep “those ideas [from] seeping into a more mainstream audience.”
Those sentiments are backed up by academics and researchers who study how internet extremism makes its way into mainstream U.S. politics and culture. Carlson’s show repeatedly echoed conspiracy theories and disinformation that gained traction on extremist forums like 4chan — and that would otherwise not have appeared on Fox News.
“Once a story reached Tucker Carlson, it was at the apex of conservative media, and Fox News is the voice of authority in conservative media,” said Robert Faris, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, who studies networked digital technologies and media. “It let other people know that it’s OK to talk about these kinds of things in the language that they use. Just that it’s on the air, it’s ambient and it’s on in so many public spaces means that anything they platform has a wider reach than any of the more committed hyper-partisan sites.”
A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment beyond the statement the company issued announcing Carlson’s departure and thanking him for his work there.
Carlson used his platform at Fox News to spread information that had been widely discredited.
Carlson featured a segment this month claiming that Ukrainian casualties in the Russian invasion were widely underreported. He was citing an altered document that first appeared on 4chan and had been widely debunked before the segment aired.
Days before that, Carlson devoted a segment to a 4chan hoax about a “Trans Day of Vengeance” that was being promoted on April Fools’ Day. As evidence, he aired a tweet from an anti-Black troll account whose name alludes to a racial slur.
Carlson also used his platform to turn his audience on certain people. Most recently, Ray Epps, who has sought a retraction over Carlson’s false allegations that he worked for the federal government and helped incite the riot at the Capitol, said on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that he believed Carlson was trying to destroy his life.
The authors of this article saw that firsthand at times when Carlson aired segments about our reporting and even lobbed personal and professional attacks at us, alleging that legitimate reporting was an effort to ruin lives and that reporting on social media platforms was activism for censorship.
