Who is Tucker Carlson? Get to know the renowned former host of Fox News

Who is Tucker Carlson? 

Tucker Carlson is an American television personality, political commentator, and journalist who started his media career as a print journalist writing for publications like the Weekly Standard, New York Times Magazine, and Esquire. He then moved into television journalism and worked as a host on several news programs including Crossfire" on CNN and "Tucker" on MSNBC. 

Tucker Carlson: Early Life and Education 

Born on 16th May 1969, in San Francisco, California, Carlson was the elder son of artist and San Francisco native Lisa McNear and Richard Warner Carlson who was a journalist and a diplomat who served as the director of Voice of America during the last six years of the Cold War. The below table shows other personal details about him 

Carlson grew up in La Jolla, California, where he attended La Jolla Country Day School. After graduating from high school, Carlson attended Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he majored in history. He also studied at the University of Oxford in England during his junior year. 

Tucker Carlson: Media career 

Carlson started his media career as a fact-checker for Policy Review, a national conservative journal that was then published by The Heritage Foundation and later acquired by the Hoover Institution. After this, he worked as an opinion writer at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1995, he joined The Weekly Standard news magazine. 

Moving further, in 2000, Carlson co-hosted the short-lived show The Spin Room on CNN. Then, in 2001, he was appointed as the co-host of Crossfire in which he and Robert Novak represented the political right. In 2003, he was hired to host a new program for PBS called Tucker Carlson: Unfiltered. This ran simultaneously with his Crossfire gig on CNN. Then, in 2009, he got hired by Fox News as a contributor. He appeared frequently as a  guest panelist on Fox’s late-night satire show Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld. In 2016, he started hosting ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ on Fox News. 

In October 2018, Tucker Carlson Tonight became the second-highest-rated cable news show in prime time, after The Sean Hannity Show. By 2020, the show averaged  5.3 million viewers with its monthly average becoming the highest as compared to any cable news program in history at that point.  

How has his exit affected the stocks of Fox News?

The sudden exit of Tucker Carlson has drastically affected the stocks of Fox News parent company, Fox Corporation which observed its shares closing 3% less at the end of the trading day after falling by as much as 5%. This drop in shares was observed after the company announced that it is parting ways with Carlson without justifying any reason for the separation.  

As per the sources, Carlson left Fox after it reached a $787.5 million settlement with voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems which sued them for defamation over the 2020 presidential election results.