The other day at Tuned In we poked some fun at conservative talker Tucker Carlson, and as you know, that’s all it takes to destroy a TV show. MSNBC had made official that Tucker will be canceled after this week, so that David Gregory’s eyebrows can have their long-overdue showdown with Keith Olbermann’s.
You may want to grab a lamp or other heavy object to heave, however, because I’m about to say something (somewhat) nice about Tucker Carlson.
I was never a particular fan of Tucker (the show), nor of Carlson’s previous incarnations on Crossfire or, especially The Spin Room, one of the worst shows CNN ever produced. But though I don’t know the guy personally, I’m at least empathetic toward Tucker the person. I’ve always had a feeling that there was a reasonable, independent thinker wrapped up in the smug smartass that he came to play on TV.
Unlike a lot of partisan hosts on TV, I didn’t get the sense that Carlson was devoted above all to reproducing one side’s daily talking points in order to put one in the ‘W’ column for his team. As I mentioned, the Bush profile that he wrote for Talk in 1999–in which Carlson quoted Bush mocking a woman he put to death as governor of Texas–was not the work of someone doing the Hannity-like lifting for a political party, and he would show the same streak on air as a TV host. And as a result, Carlson has not exactly been conservatives’ favorite TV conservative.
But he was one of the TV conservatives liberals most loved to knock, and you’ve got to put a lot of the blame for that on Carlson, which is to say, on the bow tie. Which is in turn to say, all that the bow tie–which he abandoned in the latter days of Tucker–came to represent. TV demands that people become personae, and the one Carlson picked was the bow-tie-sporting, Campus Republican baby George Will. It worked for him: it made him a steady TV fixture hosting shows on cable news for nearly a decade. But it also gave him a smirking, Little Lord Fauntleroy air that made his detractors cheer all the louder when somebody knocked his oversized lollipop out of his hand, as Jon Stewart famously did in a 2004 Crossfire appearance.
As I said, I don’t know Carlson, so I don’t really know what was really him and what was the bow tie, to what extent he’s really the independent-minded journalist and to what extent he’s really the cynical cable-news infotainer. But now he has the chance to figure it out. In the meantime, cable news marches on, and there will always be room for some new button-pusher to make a career for him or herself with a little chutzpah and the right choice of neckwear. May I suggest an ascot?