In This Episode
Rightwing billionaire takeovers, journalists getting arrested, and endless misinformation. Welcome to the current state of American journalism. This week, Alex speaks to former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta about how legacy news organizations caved to President Trump and the critical role of independent media.
She’s also joined by Jason Zengerle, author of “Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind”, to analyze how Carlson brought fringe ideas into mainstream discourse.
Order Jason Zengerle’s book here and use the code ALEX.
TRANSCRIPT
[AD BREAK]
Alex Wagner: Hi, everyone. For the past decade, it has felt like we’ve been living in two Americas. Forget policy, we don’t even have a shared reality. And apart from one unnamed megalomaniac, the most obvious source of this break between fact-based reality. And the universe of alternate facts is the right-wing media ecosystem.
[news clip]: This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country, not for the Latinos. / We have artificially elevated the cost of energy to appease this sun god climate change alarmism, this religion, the civic religion that progressives have invented. / All you hear from Democrats and social media is that ICE and Trump are Gestapo. If you’re one of these crazy Lunatrons, you think that it’s time to use new tactics or even real weapons.
Alex Wagner: Okay. Generating interest became generating outrage, and the right-wing reliance on questionable theories and bunk science and distorted analysis got way, way, away out of control.
[news clip]: There has been a massive and coordinated effort to steal this election from we the people of the United States of America. / Doesn’t make any sense at all. If the vaccine is effective, there is no reason for people who have received the vaccine to wear masks or avoid physical contact. So maybe it doesn’t work and they’re simply not telling you that. / We found out that there are people who are between the ages of one and four are getting social security that we’ve got something like sixty nine million dollars in taxpayers—[overlapping speaking] okay but let me just say.
Alex Wagner: All of this amidst the biggest crisis in media the country has ever seen. We’re talking venture capital, buying up local outlets, running them into the ground and then selling them for parts. Billionaires dripping down once acclaimed newspapers into shadows of what they once were or just gutting them to become right wing mouthpieces. Multi-million dollar mergers that are vastly consolidating newsgathering operations and handing the reins to bosses that care more about business than the truth. And an administration that wants to expedite the end of accountability and the demise of the fourth estate by actively going after the networks and the anchors themselves.
[news clip]: This morning, former CNN anchor turned independent journalist Don Lemon out of custody for facing federal civil rights charges after covering an anti-ice protest inside a church near Minneapolis.
[clip of Don Lemon]: Last night, the DOJ sent a team of federal agents to arrest me in the middle of the night for something that I’ve been doing for the last 30 years, and that is covering the news.
Alex Wagner: But if you are here listening to this, that’s maybe the side of the story you already know. What do we do with mainstream media that is increasingly divorced from the truth and exists mostly to breed contempt? Can independent media fill the gap? Will it? Somebody better. Because institutional media used to be the fourth estate. But it is increasingly becoming Donald Trump’s real estate. [music plays] I’m Alex Wagner, and this week on Runaway Country, how Fox News changed everything for cable and beyond. What we lose when we lose legacy media and independent media’s long road to stopping the bleeding. We’ll be talking to journalist Jason Zengerle, whose new book, Hated by All the Right People, tracks the Foxification of conservative coverage through the Forrest Gump of the right-wing media ecosystem, Tucker Carlson.
Jason Zengerle: He was very good at taking these really extreme right-wing fringe ideas in the darkest corners of the internet and smuggling them onto prime time on Fox and presenting them in a more palatable way.
Alex Wagner: But first, I wanted to have an old friend on the show to talk about his experience swimming against the shifting tides of corporate capitulation. Jim Acosta is a longtime journalist who now carries the torch for independent media. Before that, he was CNN’s White House correspondent, where he was a thorn in the side of Donald Trump during his first administration. And now, well, Acosta has some choice words for the state of journalism in America.
Jim Acosta: Like, it’s an embarrassment that we’re the richest, most powerful country in the world, and we have shit for news in this country. It’s shit.
Alex Wagner: Is our conversation. First of all, Jim, to my mind, we never did like linear television together.
Jim Acosta: I don’t think so, no, because we were in our little competing spaces.
Alex Wagner: We were in different bubbles. I recognize game, recognize game though. And I was always a fan of yours on CNN. And it’s a pleasure to be able to talk to you unfettered with curse words on the podcast platform. So thank you for doing this.
Jim Acosta: I love it. Yeah, I get to say fuck and all this stuff all the time. And these little old ladies come up to me and say, oh, my God, I didn’t—
Alex Wagner: I didn’t know you had such a potty mouth!
Jim Acosta: Yeah, it’s like, uh, what are you going to do?
Alex Wagner: Well, lady, that’s fucking who I am.
Jim Acosta: Exactly! Fucking deal with it!
Alex Wagner: It’s great to have pure undiluted Acosta be able to minimize that shit, so we win.
Jim Acosta: That’s my plan.
Alex Wagner: I do want to talk to you as someone who was kind of had to deal with and I maybe we wouldn’t say casualty of leadership that wanted to curry favor with Donald Trump and you know, you were in cable news in the linear television institution of linear television. When you look at the media landscape right now and you see the Ellison’s at CBS, you see the blossoming of a hardcore right-wing echo chamber online. You see an institution like the Washington Post being gutted by Jeff Bezos. What changes do you think are most significant and worrisome to you when you look out on our present sort of information landscape?
Jim Acosta: Yeah, I mean, where to begin, right? I mean it has been, it’s been just a huge disappointment. And I guess I shouldn’t be diplomatic. It’s been a huge shit show.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Jim Acosta: Since Donald Trump came back to the White House. And, you know, I grew up in this business. I first started at CBS News and then worked at CNN. And I worked around a lot of people who had sort of very muscular attitude about the press. And our rights and how we’re there to hold people to account and not put up with their bullshit Democrat or Republican. And if like, when I was a White House correspondent, if a press secretary would call and complain about a story, be like, okay, thanks, take a number, we’ll get back to you.
Alex Wagner: Bye.
Jim Acosta: Bye. And we know what we’re doing, we’re our best, we are doing good jobs and so on. And if you can’t handle the scrutiny, get out of here. And something like it was like a light switch of cowardice that was flipped about a year ago when he came back into office and you saw all of this crazy capitulation going on and it was like being transported to the Twilight Zone of of wussies where you had CBS and ABC paying basically bribes to Donald Trump for a a presidential library I mean what a crock of shit.
Alex Wagner: Well, it’s because he’s such a big reader, Jim. We want to make sure that the books are preserved.
Jim Acosta: They need all those books that they’re going to put in there and all of those different variations of his mugshot that I’m sure they’ll put in every room. But you know, it has been, it’s been really kind of jaw dropping to see it play out. And just lately, what’s happened over at the Washington Post, I mean, I grew up in the D.C. Area.
Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm
Jim Acosta: And, you know, my mom got the Washington Post on the doorstep every morning and she would get it out on the breakfast table and read it cover to cover. And I grew up just idolizing the Washington post and Woodward and Bernstein and everything. And to see what that has become, it’s just it’s unbelievable. And the way they’ve gutted the Washington posts, killing off the sports department, which was my favorite section of the favorite to read growing up, reading about my Redskins and my Capitals and my Bullets and all that stuff. And then, you know, they kill the sports department and then the publisher of the newspaper is photographed at the Super Bowl, acting like a douche bag, I mean, you just can’t make this stuff up—
Alex Wagner: Soon to be and then fired and then fired.
Jim Acosta: [laughs] So, I mean, I don’t know, we could take this, I guess, one bite of the apple at a time, but my sense of it is, is that the public is already tired of this. They’re already kind of enraged with this, and they can sniff this stuff out. People are intelligent. When I worked at CBS a million years ago, there was a producer there who would say, The people who watch the CBS Evening News are smart fucking people.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Jim Acosta: And I remember and I still remember that to this day and and how they think over at CBS that they can just have the anchor of the evening news end the newscast by saying, We salute you Marco Rubio. It’s it’s horseshit. I don’t know what—
Alex Wagner: And as you and I, I worked at CBS for a short amount of time, but a time nonetheless, and they take, they used to take their status as the Tiffany Network and Arbiters of Truth, the former home of, or the home of Cronkite, real seriously. So it is, it is difficult to imagine the reality under which people are putting those shows together now, and it’s honestly difficult to watch what those shows have become. But I mean, I think one of the realities that is less discussed is you can, you know, you can destroy the Washington Post, you can destroy CBS News, you can do so in an effort to make, you know, to curry favor with this administration. The problem is it’s not or it is Humpty Dumpty. You can’t put it back together again. That’s what I think is most distressing, right? People don’t, aren’t going to, I think one day come back to the Washington Post, they’re not going to come back to newspapers, they are not going to come to the evening news. Even if you had new ownership, even if you had different anchors and different productions, like it’s just gone. And so that means people turn where? People turn to, you know, people like you, people like me, which is great. But I wonder if you think there’s any kind of what we lose in that process, because I love to think that these two things, the new media landscape and the institutional media can live in coexistence. But the reality is that one is going to inherit the mantle of information analysis and dispersal, and the other one’s just gonna die. And you lose a lot when you lose institutional media. And I think nobody really talks about that part as much.
Jim Acosta: No, it’s absolutely true. I mean, I worked at CNN for 18 years and they have the largest news organization in the world, maybe even more than the BBC. And they have bureaus and reporters and producers and photographers all over the world. And you just can’t replace that with a podcast. I mean that, we just don’t have the reach. I would love to have a Hong Kong bureau for the—
Alex Wagner: You will one day.
Jim Acosta: But you know we’ll work on that we’ll get on that right away but um you know when I worked at CBS News I mean they you know the fact that Dan Rather was there for Tiananmen Square I mean you just that that kind of coverage is it’s invaluable to the American people and I you know I do think though Alex what is taking place right now is that the media landscape is sort of shifting in real time uh underneath our feet and it’s gonna take some time to get used to all of this. I do think we may get to a day where some of the folks like us start collaborating more and more, and perhaps form partnerships and relationships. I hear this from my sub-stack subscribers all the time. I wish I could subscribe to one thing and get all of you at the same time. And I’m like—
Alex Wagner: It’s called the network. [laughter]
Jim Acosta: Yes, I would like that too.
Alex Wagner: Bring Acosta and Wagner together at last!
Jim Acosta: Let’s do it, but I mean like you know, and there’s a part of me that says well If only a benevolent billionaire would step in and help us with the resources but then fucking Jeff Bezos that son of a bitch, you know is already screwing things up. And so maybe that doesn’t work either and so, maybe we need to do something from the grassroots up and we need people powered media in this country I mean Alex the thing the thing that pisses me off more than anything I talk about this all the time when I do speaking engagements is like, look what our public broadcasting has become.
Alex Wagner: I know.
Jim Acosta: I mean, Donald Trump is like dancing on the grave of public broadcasting in America. The other day they had to cancel the weekend edition of the PBS NewsHour. I’m sorry. Like we should have like little old ladies down at the Capitol with pitchforks and torches demanding that they release the funding for PBS and NPR for Christ’s sake. And we should, I mean they have to put on the—
Alex Wagner: I would argue young ladies, and young men too!
Jim Acosta: All ladies, all men.
[AD BREAK]
Alex Wagner: This has been said a trillion times, but there’s always so much happening with this administration that shocks the conscience that people become numb to it. But both the erosion of public media, the calculated atrophy, which is a strategy on the part of this administration, but also the consolidation. And I’m not just talking about the Ellisons, which make headlines for the sale of CNN to someone at some point. It’s being spun off from Time Warner. And the more valuable assets are going to probably be purchased by Netflix. But there’s, you know, there’s a big TEGNA. Is it does someone know? Is it, it’s TEGNA? Right? Nexstar? [overlapping voices] TEGNA. I’m like going with the Italian like Bologna.
Jim Acosta: Bologna, Tegna. No, I know because there’s they connect right and they’ve they scrambled the letters—
Alex Wagner: Oh my God, that’s right.
Jim Acosta: I think that’s what it is and they’re trying to create this bastard stepchild of local media which would be like Sinclair, we already have the Sinclairs assholes over here and now we’re going to have a new confederation of other assholes from the right wing. They complain about the liberal media nonstop over at Fox, these assholes at Fox complain about it nonstop and they are all doing this shit themselves so stop complaining Greg Gutfeld, you know.
Alex Wagner: For people who have not paid attention to this, which is understandable, the TEGNA Nexstar merger would be effectively a hostile consolidation of almost every local station in the United States. Now, some of them are affiliated with larger networks, but the fact, getting a vice grip on local TV stations at the same time that you’re either selling off the bigger cable news outlets, consolidating them, or. You know, withering them away in a strategy by by firing everybody that works at them is is like a real fucking problem for information. And I think the local stuff is particularly pernicious because that’s still very trusted. Like, you know there’s the there’s a sort of people feel like maybe national news has become partisan or they believe that there’s some, you know, slant.
Jim Acosta: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: Local news remains one of those bastions of I guess we’ll call integrity in the minds of a lot of folk across the United States and to have a decidedly sort of partisan operation behind I think something like 84% of local stations in the country seems like real bad news for the American population. What do you think about it as someone who looks at this—
Jim Acosta: I agree with you. I worked in local news before going to network stuff and I worked in Knoxville, Tennessee and Dallas and Chicago and those are the places where I learned how to be a reporter and they were just absolutely wonderful places to work with wonderful people and I really value what local news does. I mean think about you know your local weatherman providing you know real-time forecasts on like tornadoes coming through your area and stuff like that. We have to have that that shit needs to keep going in this country and needs to be trusted. And I mean, I just think that it would be a travesty if all of our local stations or a big chunk of it were to become like that creepy Sinclair video. Remember from a few years ago where all the anchors were reading the same thing at the same time?
[news clip]: [overlapping voices] Sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. Some media, some policy, some fake news, are true without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the union used their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
Jim Acosta: And it was like this creepy dystopian 1984 thing. We can’t have Ellison type rich billionaire jerks running all of our local stations around the country. It needs to be stopped. And what’s amazing about that is that the FCC really should be in the business of preventing that from occurring. But the FCC has been too busy going after people like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, because they say, you shouldn’t be opinionated on late night TV. Meanwhile, they’re like, oh yeah, by the way, all you rich guys who want to gobble up all these local stations and turn them into Fox, we’re just fine with that. And so there needs to be some sanity restored to our information systems in this country. I think that they’re badly broken, and I think it’s a serious emergency for the American people. I would love to see a public broadcasting built up like a fire if I could run for office and get elected—
Alex Wagner: You can Jim, but we’ll get to that later.
Jim Acosta: I would say, let’s make public broadcasting like the BBC and make it too big to fail, put all of these mechanisms in place to prevent partisan tomfoolery and really have good serious journalism in this country that is for the public benefit instead of what we have right now, which is like it’s an embarrassment that we’re the richest, most powerful country in the world and we have shit for news in this country, it’s shit. [laughs]
Alex Wagner: You know what’s so interesting is I think the more time you spend in cable or just in institutional media, the more you’re like, we need public broadcasting because the more, you see the sausage being made, the more you like, oh, we exist at the whims of corporate overlords who do not have the interests of news and information and the general public at heart. It is profit and profit is contingent on a receptive political environment in many ways, or receptive regulatory environment. And so like that doesn’t, this is, that is a flawed system. That doesn’t mean it can’t exist, but like if that’s the only thing, that’s, the only bulwark we have, it is not sufficient. You just like speak to enough CNN and MSNOW people, and I would assume also Fox people, and the more you’re going to get like, let’s all go work at PBS and make it great.
Jim Acosta: I think that would be wonderful, and there are so many terrific journalists in this country, both broadcast and print, and just about everybody, unless maybe you’re at the New York Times or something, you’re just getting the shaft these days. 60 Minutes used to be the end-all, be-all of broadcast journalism, and they’re fucked. Thank you Bari Weiss. When 60 Minutes is in trouble, we’re all in trouble. It just seems to me like there’s just a different way to build a better mousetrap here, it seems to me.
Alex Wagner: Can we talk about Fox for a second? Because we’re going to be talking to Jason Zengerle, who has a new biography about Tucker Carlson out, and he sort of makes the argument that the radicalization of Tucker Carlson, and to some degree Fox News mirrors the radicalization, of the country on whole, and certainly the Republican party. First of all, how important do you think Fox is slash was in terms of moving the goalposts to the right in the national conversation?
Jim Acosta: I mean, it’s kind of the whole ballgame, isn’t it? I mean…
Alex Wagner: Did you think about it when you were at CNN? Were you aware of what was happening at Fox versus what was happening? And I don’t mean to draw a line of equivalents between what happened at MSNBC as a former employee and current analyst and what happens at Fox. I think that there’s a very different standard for truth and integrity. But nonetheless, how aware were you of what is going on there versus what you guys were doing at CNN.
Jim Acosta: Boy, that is a, that’s a good question and it’s a complicated question. I think CNN has, when I was there at CNN, there was always the feeling like, wow, we’re getting pressed from both sides here and we’re trying to stay in the middle. We’re trying do the news and so on and Fox, I mean, they got going in the mid nineties and was basically like, hey, we are going to do a news network. But wink wink, it’s going to be exactly what you think on the right. I don’t think it’s fair to compare MSNBC or MSNOW to Fox because I think to a large extent, MSNOW is in the world of reality, insanity. You know what I mean? Like when you or Rachel or Lawrence are presenting a show over there, it’s news, it may be opinionated news, but it’s true and it’s from the real world. It’s from earth one. Over at Fox, I mean, during the January 6th insurrection, you had Fox anchors texting with Mark Meadows saying, hey, we better get Donald Trump under control or the 25th amendment. I mean that that kind of shit was going down during January 6th. They got sued. They got the shit sued out of them because they were lying to the American people about the integrity of the 2020 election. That didn’t happen anywhere else. To me, I think Fox is basically like the cigarette companies of like the 19 of like late 20th century. When we were just about to get to the truth that they were manipulating the nicotine levels and the cigarettes in order to get everybody around the world hooked on cigarettes. I think Fox, to a large extent, has put together a product that hooks our senior citizens and people in those demographic groups. They get them hooked to outrage and race-based kind of, you know, you know attack media outrage media.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
And I think it’s just totally destructive for our democracy It is it is very Destabilizing for our Democracy and when I was at CNN there wasn’t a whole lot you could do it was sort of like well We’re not going to go down that road We can hold Donald Trump’s feet to the fire and give them a hard time and so on but we’re not going to become so uh blindly partisan that we’re now part of the problem, too. And so but I mean look what the impact is you know, a large lion’s share of the cable audience goes to Fox, a smaller, large portion of the audience goes to MS, and then CNN is sort of stuck like just flailing and treading water, flailing in the middle. And I think they have had like different iterations of, well, what do we do about this? And my sense is they just say, they have not been able to figure out how to become more viable in the process. And my sense of it is, is that the best way to keep a place like that in business is just to do no-holds-barred, tough-ass journalism.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, which is what you were doing.
Jim Acosta: Which is what we were doing during the first administration, the ratings were the best that they, I think, ever were during January 6th. And I think that’s what the public came to expect from that news organization. And I mean, you can have a conversation about, well, what happened after that, and lots of different opinions there, but it seems to me that all of this sort of underlines the problem that we just, we have a very poor information system in this country that’s just not meeting the moment.
Alex Wagner: I wonder, you know, you use the cigarette metaphor and I totally agree with you. It’s like, oh, you guys are causing harm to the American public. But Philip Morris may be called Altria or whatever the fuck it ended up being called and cigarettes may not be consumed with the same abandon that they once were. But in their place, you have like Zyn and like vape pens. And so, in the way that Fox is increasingly an aging audience. Tucker Carlson isn’t even at Fox anymore. He’s doing his own podcast, right? Like the most influential voices on the right are in many ways no longer on Fox. Fox is in some ways like a readout of like an older generation, like a gentler, kinder conservative who’s not-
Jim Acosta: Montgomery Ward’s or Sears.
Alex Wagner: Exactly. It’s Megyn Kelly screaming about the Super Bowl and how it’s a betrayal of America.
Jim Acosta: That’s what happened, but here’s this is one of the people of memory hold a lot of this stuff. but this is part of the problem remember when fox during the 2020 election. They sort of had like this come to Jesus moment.
Alex Wagner: Yes.
Jim Acosta: Where they’re starting to like present reality—
Alex Wagner: Exactly.
Jim Acosta: Again But they saw the ratings hemorrhaging and going over to places like Newsmax and OAN and you know Sean Hannity or whatever they had a hissy fit and they decided to go back to doing bullshit and they became the bullshit factory again. And I just you know that was a really key moment, I think, in our history because that was part of the process that I think helped resurrect Donald Trump. Yes, it was Kevin McCarthy and going down to Mar-a-Lago, and yes, it is Mitch McConnell and not corralling enough senators to impeach, convict, and throw his ass out and keep him locked out forever and ever. But Fox going back to the dark side also put us on the path to where we are today, I think.
Alex Wagner: I wonder where, like, where do you see the power in terms of news and information right now? Like, and you can be as vague or specific as you want, because I do think, like part of me, I believe in 2020, Fox was insanely important in terms of lying to the American public and then whitewashing Trump’s lies and remains relevant. But as I think about it, I just don’t even… I still think, you know, in terms of audience size, institutional media is still the winner, but in terms sphere of influence, I don’t know that I would say it’s at Fox anymore. I don’t know that, I would not say it, I mean like, Joe Rogan is like, I mean, the most relevant probably, right? How do you look at it in terms of like, what if Trump, for example, tries to steal the 2026 election? Who needs to be the bulwark against that and or who could greatly assist him in trying to steal another election?
Jim Acosta: I think that the podcast side of things has become very influential. I think Joe Rogan, people like him, are now towering in influence in this industry. Not for better, definitely for worse. And I love it when I see Joe Rogan do a podcast, he’s like, you know, maybe Donald Trump is full of shit on this Epstein files thing. And I’m like, yeah, no fucking shit, man—
Alex Wagner: Thirty-eight thousand times he’s in there, dude.
Jim Acosta: Welcome to the party pal. And I, you know, like a lot of this is very disingenuous and a lot this is, you they’re doing things to get an audience and Megyn Kelly, could there be a more repugnant person in American life today than Megyn Kelly? I mean, she says the other day, I wanna feel sorry or am I supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pret.
Ti but sorry I don’t? Like, fuck you, like what is wrong with you? Where’s your soul?
Alex Wagner: I don’t know. That’s actually a very important question that I don t know the answer to.
Jim Acosta: But I do think that these performers, if I could call them that, they are now becoming much more influential in some cases than Fox. I think you’re right about that. It is kind of a dying medium, like a Montgomery Wards or Sears or something like that. And we’ll just have to see how this plays out. But I mean, to me, I always go back to that saying from Jurassic Park, nature finds a way. And I think that… The landscape is shifting, there are folks like you and me who are coming over to independent media. There are more folks from Earth One and the same base, sanity-based, reality-based world coming over into independent media, and as that builds up and grows, hopefully we will coalesce and come together as a force too in time for this to not all go completely down the shitter, but I do think that it is a reaction to legacy and corporate media sort of being in a shambles right now.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Jim Acosta: I think there are some exceptions. I think the Wall Street Journal has done some remarkable journalism. I’ve been kind of astonished by this, it being a Murdoch-owned property, but they’ve gotten some Washington Post reporters over there and they’re doing a dynamite job. They’ve sort of replaced the Washington Post as keeping the New York Times honest and staying competitive with them. So.
Alex Wagner: Wait, wait, let’s just pause on that for a second. Jim Acosta saying that Rupert fucking Murdoch is doing a better job of running a newspaper than Jeff Bezos. I don’t disagree with you. I mean, the reporting out of the journal under duress is phenomenal, is phenomenal.
Jim Acosta: It’s not a popular hot take, but I do think that I do think the Wall Street Journal has been kicking some ass lately in the thing with the spy shake the other day and that explosive story, they’ve been doing some great the, um, the birthday book, I believe Wall Street Journal—
Alex Wagner: The Trump Epstein birthday book was all The Wall Street Journal, for which they were sued, I think $65 billion. I’m getting the number wrong, but some outlandish number by Donald Trump.
Jim Acosta: Wouldn’t it be great if we could sue him back and make a bunch of fucking money?
Alex Wagner: Fuck you, John Roberts. Fuck you John Roberts.
Jim Acosta: Exactly. Trump has called me crazy on Twitter. Can I sue him? I mean, I’ve not been adjudicated as a crazy person. Can I sue him for a billion dollars?
Alex Wagner: You will after this podcast. They’ll be like, did you hear him on Runaway Country? [laughter] You do read books. You deserve a library. His is just going to be filled with like Shaq’s shoe and I don’t even know what else. I don’t know, Jim. I really appreciate, first of all, I think you’re absolutely right. We’re in some sort of pendulum swing here where you’re going to see a greater collapse of institutional media. You’ll see an even, I think, more florid flowering to be redundant about it. Of independent media and then eventually there needs to be some institutionalization of independent media, which may mean no more than you know, smaller networks of independent producers or maybe a large network, but it won’t make sense at a certain point to have 36,000 podcasts out there and people are going to want some kind of unified programming on offer.
Jim Acosta: Yeah, and Substack is already growing. I mean, it’s doing gangbusters these days, and I know you’re there, and I’m there, and a bunch of folks are there, and a lot of people just go there to get their news now. And there’s some great, like Paul Krugman is there, he writes amazing stuff, Joyce Vance, I mean there’s just amazing people over there. And so I think it’s kind of happening, it’s just not, as you said, it’s not coalescing in a way that is. I mean, I was just speaking with a guy earlier today about, I wish I could just go to a place like I used to go to for Walter Cronkite and the CBS, I’m sorry, sir, that does not exist right now.
Alex Wagner: No, Jim Acosta is in a hotel room and I’m in my basement. Like we don’t have that yet. We’re not Cronkite, but, but I do think with consolidation, which is usually a bad word, there comes resourcing. And hopefully we can see a day where, um, you can have a media ecosystem that champions independence and integrity, but also has some fucking resources to have a Hong Kong bureau, you know what I mean? That’s not funded by the Amazon, um mogul. That’s I think the lesson we’ve all learned the hard way.
Jim Acosta: Yeah, we need like a billionaire to make a deposit that cannot be withdrawn. It’s just it’s just like a one way deal. You put in you plunk down a billion dollars.
Alex Wagner: Then you get you get no control. That’s going to go over really well.
Jim Acosta: And then you go sell your widgets and leave us alone. Something like that would be good.
Alex Wagner: Thanks for the billion dollars, fuck you, go on your way. Jim Acosta is not a businessman, this we know, but goddamn, is he a great reporter.
Jim Acosta: Thank you.
Alex Wagner: But I look forward to the moment at which someone offers us conjoined offices.
Jim Acosta: Love that.
Alex Wagner: In our new skyscraper media operation. But until then, I’m just gonna have to keep on inviting you back to this podcast. I’m very grateful for your time, my friend.
Jim Acosta: You’re welcome any time let’s do it again.
Alex Wagner: For sure. After the break, putting this all into context with Jason Zengerle.
[AD BREAK]
Alex Wagner: Jason, the book is both specific and sort of not universal, but Tucker is a vehicle for better understanding what’s happened to conservatism and to some degree the Republican Party in the last, I’ll call it, half decade or decade. God, I have no sense of time anymore. [laughter]
Jason Zengerle: It’s a flat circle, yeah.
Alex Wagner: Time is a dimension. One of the things that stands out to me is the way in which rejection is so much the origin story for the most prominent conservatives in America right now. And Tucker Carlson is no different, right? Like we know that Trump is not taken seriously as a political candidate. He’s kind of a carnival barker, reality TV clown. He is not a real businessman, at least as far as the New York mockers are concerned, and is always intent on proving himself. JD Vance is rejected from Yale, like the sort of liberal elites of academia and Yale and I would argue that some of his political positioning is just purely to own the libs, right? But Tucker also has a rejection story and it’s there are personal aspects of it and professional. And I wonder, I know this is like almost the entirety of the book, but of the rejections that he faced, of the excommunications that he’s faced, especially professionally, which do you think were most formative, especially for people who haven’t read the book? Tell us the story a little bit about how this man became who he is.
Jason Zengerle: Well, I mean, he was a very successful magazine writer, very young magazine writer. Extremely successful and was on like a trajectory that, you know, I think would have had him at the top of the profession had he stuck with it. But I think he recognized that there being at the the top of the professional of, you now, print journalism really wasn’t gonna mean all that much. So he switched over to television and he had some initial success there. But then he suffered this, you really kind o f profound humiliation in 2004 when he was hosting Crossfire. And Jon Stewart went on the show and came into the Crossfire studio, just kind of loaded for bear to give a critique of Crossfire and a critique that basically was saying that the show was hurting America, that it was play acting, it was pro wrestling, it was just a bunch of hacks. He went after Tucker in particular. He made fun of him for wearing a bow tie, which was Tucker’s signature look at the time. I mean, he called him a dick. You know, and Crossfire was—
Alex Wagner: God forbid. I’m sorry, part of me is, I mean, I get it, I’m not. [both speaking] Yeah, right, okay. No, that wasn’t, things were different back then.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, yeah, at the time it was, it was shocking. And, and, you know, Crossfire had a studio audience and like the studio audience is like cheering Stewart on and like taking his side and—
[clip of Jon Stewart]: No, this is theater. I mean, it’s obvious. How old are you?
[clip of Tucker Carlson]: 35.
[clip of Jon Stewart]: And you wear a bow tie.
[clip of Tucker Carlson]: Yeah, I do. [laughter] I know. I know, I’m right. Let me just go. Come on.
[clip of Jon Stewart]: And listen, I am not suggesting that you’re not a smart guy because those are not easy to tie. But the thing is that this, you’re doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. [both speaking] It’s not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I’ll tell you why—
Jason Zengerle: Uh, like a month or two after that happened, CNN canceled Crossfire and Tucker left the network. And it was, I mean, it was like a pretty, you know, devastating career blow and. You know, Tucker was like very much a member of the club of like sort of the, you know elite DC journalism, political circles, and, and he remained a member the club, but I think he felt that the people in that club didn’t come to his defense, like didn’t get his back. They, you, they took Stewart’s side. They, they ratified Stewart’s critique. And I think that kind of planted a seed of resentment that, you know, and then he struggled after that. He didn’t do well in cable news. He was in MSNBC for a while, got fired from there. He eventually got picked up at Fox, but he was a really low level third tier pundit there. He was hosting the weekend show. And I thing he started to feel like, you know the world didn’t really sufficiently appreciate his talents and wasn’t taking advantage of them. And that kind furthered the resentment.
Alex Wagner: As someone who has been fired from MSNBC and hosted a weekend show, I just, I do have to ask, is his ego, do you think, particularly fragile? Because I certainly didn’t whip around and say like, fuck the elites, like fuck media, fuck, you know, it just, his, and certainly there’s more to the story than just that, right? Like, and the Fox chapter is absolutely relevant in all of this and how he becomes such a. Well important voice if not the central voice at Fox right and his relationship with the Murdochs but without rehashing every bit of his history I just I wonder if you have an assessment of his I don’t want to say personal failing but his personal weak weakness is because it does feel like I mean I’m sure it sucks.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: For John Stewart to be making fun of you and have like, you know, this sort of like the colosseum cheering for John Stewart—
Jason Zengerle: And it was like the first viral video moment. I mean, it went well beyond just the air that day. It was kind of everywhere. And yeah, I don’t know. I’ve never experienced that kind of humiliation.
Alex Wagner: Yes. I mean, I don’t know, I’ve experienced some different forms of humiliation in terms of like, you know, being fired, being canceled, all that shit. And there is a scar tissue that builds up. But I am struck, and I mentioned Trump and Vance and Carlson in particular, because by all outside accounts, at one point, they were more sort of integrated into society. They were swimming in the same waters. And then there’s just something that happens to them. And I guess maybe this is a good time to talk about Tucker’s, you know, after he’s cast off from Fox for reasons that remain unclear, and I’m not going to ask you to pontificate because it’s everybody has a theory, right?
Jason Zengerle: No one knows, yeah.
Alex Wagner: He like becomes, he starts playing footsie and then outright embracing what the Atlantic calls like the the intellectual edgelords of the GOP. Like these kind of radical… Whether it’s Peter Thiel and like Caesarism, which is calling for like autocracy and like an iron fist or, you know, Nick Fuentes and white nationalism and antisemitism, he really starts drinking a particularly venomous tasting Kool-Aid.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah. [both speaking] But he was like tiptoeing towards them even before he got fired from Fox. I mean, like he had Curtis Yarvin on his Fox show.
Alex Wagner: Right, right.
Jason Zengerle: You know, and he’s, I mean the thing that he was doing at Fox, and I think he’s still doing it to a certain degree, is he’s actually doing it more now, but in a different way. Like he was very good at like taking these like really extreme right-wing fringe ideas, you know, in the darkest corners of the internet, and like smuggling them on to prime time on Fox, and presenting them. In a more palatable way. So, you know, like great replacement theory, I think is probably the best example of that.
Alex Wagner: Exactly yeah yeah yeah.
But like, you gotta hope like that the median 70 something Fox viewer, if they were doing counter great replacement theory like on the Daily Stormer, you know like in its rawest purest form, they would be like, oh God, I can’t be down with this. But then Tucker presents it and he’s like, you know I’m just asking questions and you can’t deny. And they’re like, Oh, this makes sense. And I think he was kind of doing that before. I mean, definitely since he has left Fox, like. The guardrails are off, he’s gone further and further. I think he has to do that in part because he doesn’t have the built-in Fox audience, so he needs to generate interest and outrage and sort of outright saying this stuff is one of the strategies he has. I think also he has a really good political and professional radar. I think it’s finally honed and it’s been really good over the past 10 years. And the fact that he’s doing this stuff, I mean, I think he’s making the calculus that, you know, to be successful in conservative media and conservative politics these days, like, you kind of need the neo-Nazis on your side. [scoffs] That’s where he thinks the energy is. And, you know it’d be really like interesting and scary to see if he’s proven right. But I feel like that explains a lot of his recent moves and his recent statements.
Alex Wagner: Well, and that’s a cautionary tale, I think, for the Republican Party on whole, right? I mean, at first, it’s like you’re sort of just asking questions about neo-Nazism, and then you arrive at the calculation that your party or your channel or your podcast or your audience doesn’t exist without the neo-Nazis in the room.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, yeah.
Alex Wagner: And I guess I wonder, I know you didn’t interview Tucker for the book, but you’ve known him for a while and you obviously did your homework here. Do you have a sense? Of how much it’s just audience maintenance and how much is genuinely like a very smart person. I mean, you read early Tucker Carlson articles and even, and I say this as someone who used to have a cable show where you have, you know, and learned at the hand of Rachel Maddow, like the people that can do those long monologues and like write for themselves, it’s a specific art and it requires rigor, right?
Jason Zengerle: Yes.
Alex Wagner: Like, and he is not a dummy. But he has become so dangerous, I think, in his rhetoric and his positions. I just wonder how much it is just kind of like click-baity and how much it is, just a person who has been brought over to the darkest end of the conservative universe.
Jason Zengerle: I guess, I guess I think it’s a combination. Like I think that, I mean, I, I guess I, you know, it’s not, it’s like ratings and click bait as much, or it’s not click bait for ratings. I don’t think like, I do think Tucker is like, he’s like not, I don’t, I don’t really think there’s a media figure anymore. I mean I think he’s kind of like a, he’s a movement leader at this point. And I think, he wants to stay, you know, a step ahead of the movement and where it’s going. So he can capitalize on whatever the numbers are. And I that’s what he’s doing. You know, that said, like. Whether it starts out as kind of like a cynical ploy and it involves audience capture, I think it’s just human nature that if you say something enough, and especially if you’re rewarded for saying it and you have success saying it, you do kind of come to believe it.
Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm. Red Hill.
Jason Zengerle: You kind of get higher in supply. Yeah, and I think that, and I that happens probably a lot in television. [laughter] I mean, you know better than me, but it seems like, you kind of like live in this little bubble of constant affirmation. It would sort of go to your head and you would start to believe these things. So I think, that’s happening a bit, but he… He articulates these things in such a way and he says it sort of with such conviction. I mean, you kind of do have to believe that he—
Alex Wagner: Yeah, I mean, I think authenticity is actually the thing that matters maybe most, not even accuracy, but authenticity in this new media landscape. The New York Times, in a review of your book, has this line that really stuck out to me, Carlson’s darkest impulses were nurtured and fanned by a rapidly evolving media landscape, character meets technology. And like that I think is really important is like he’s going through this thing, or maybe that you can’t separate the two, but the way in which he’s like in this completely uncensored.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: In many ways hermetically sealed. He’s broadcasting from, as you pointed out in other interviews, he lives on two islands, both physically and kind of metaphorically, right? He’s like in his barn in Maine or he’s in Florida on a different island. And he’s kind of unto himself and what is most resonant and what the best feedback he gets is probably the most incendiary stuff he tackles.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, he lives in a different reality, I think, from us, I would say. I mean, and I think people in that reality would say we live in a different reality. [laughter]
Alex Wagner: Well, yeah. I mean, let’s talk a little bit about how his reality intersects and influences other conservatives because he has an interesting relationship with Trump, right? It has its ups and downs. I wonder if you could give me your assessment of where it stands today and the degree to which there is any sense that the playing field isn’t big enough for those two big dogs.
Jason Zengerle: I think the playing field is big enough just because I think Trump is going away at some point, he’s going away, and I think they can coexist. [laughter] As I understand it from others, they do actually genuinely get along, they enjoy each other because they’re both, they’re kind of good company, I guess. They say outrageous shit and they kind of enjoy that back and forth. You know, he, he wants to be perceived as being close to Trump. Whereas like in Trump’s first presidency, when he was still on Fox, I think he was very wary of being perceived as like being a Trump person, but he’s obviously very pro-MAGA and you know, pro sort of what Trump was doing, but didn’t want to be seen as like a Trump lackey per se.
Alex Wagner: Like Sean Hannity?
Jason Zengerle: Exactly like Sean Hannity, I think that was, you know, he, I think he wanted to avoid the Sean Hannity trap, basically, you know, so like, he wouldn’t, like, go visit Trump at the White House, he would call him with Trump called him, he would, like the call to go to voicemail sometimes, this time around, and I think this has to do with him not being on Fox and needing to sort of stay, you know, kind of relevant and have people pay attention to him, He, he wants people to know that he and Trump talk. I mean, you know, he, he goes to the White House, he gets photographed there. You know, we had like lunch at the White house on two consecutive Fridays and, you know his business partner is in the Oval Office taking pictures of him. That then he tweets out on social media. Like he wants it known that he’s, he’s close to Trump and you know, as I write in the book, like he was, he was like an extremely influential person during the 2024 campaign and into the transition. I mean, he got, you know, J.D. Vance, the vice presidential, was one of the people pushing for Vance and then Vance was ultimately picked. He pushed hard for Bobby Kennedy at HHS and Tulsi Gabbard and even like sub cabinet posts—
Alex Wagner: Thanks. Thanks, Tucker.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah. Yeah. These are all, these are all people that Tucker brought us.
Alex Wagner: Murderer’s Row of Talents.
Jason Zengerle: I mean, he’s, you know, he doesn’t win every fight. I mean he—
Alex Wagner: Iran. Venezuela. Greenland.
Jason Zengerle: Well, I don’t, yeah, well, Greenland hasn’t happened yet, right? So maybe, I dunno. The thing about Venezuela that was interesting, to me at least, was he opposed it beforehand. And his reasons for opposing it were absolutely nuts. I mean it was saying it was the global homo forces were gonna do it because they wanted to get gay marriage into Venezuela, because I guess Maduro is against gay marriage. After Trump did it, he kind of like backed off, Tucker backed off a little bit. He didn’t really criticize it. He kind of offered it qualified support saying, he didn’t decapitate the entire government. He just did one guy, so it’s not gonna be like Iraq and we’re gonna take their oil and that’s good. So I feel like, I thought that was interesting because I almost felt like he wanted to save face. He wanted people to still think he was influential, but he’s clearly someone that Trump likes and enjoys and definitely listens to. And I think, you know, I think when it comes to like JD Vance, like I think the relationship is even tighter than his one with Trump. Like there, like there’s a real kind of, I think there’s personal kind of relationship, but there’s also an intellectual, you know.
Alex Wagner: Partnership.
Jason Zengerle: Partnership there that I think is pretty strong.
Alex Wagner: I just remember from the Dominion lawsuit, Tucker understood the 2020 hadn’t been stolen, the election I mean, and then sort of gradually does a 180 and then is all of a sudden looking at the raw video footage and just becomes a truther on that.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: You know, I asked this because we, you know, we’re talking about this in the season of Trump saying we need to nationalize elections. I’m seizing 700 boxes of ballots from Fulton County and saying explicitly, like, you can’t really trust blue states or blue cities to run their own elections. There’s fraud in Detroit and Philadelphia and Atlanta. Do you sense, I guess, as it concerns that particular chapter, that any of Carlson’s instincts about reality and democracy and whole, you know, preserving the system, but any of those still apply as we barreled towards potential more cries of election interference and a fraudulent election in 2026 or 2028.
Jason Zengerle: It sure doesn’t seem that way. I mean, you just look at the way, I mean yeah, he, you know, in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 elections, like both off air, but even on air, you know, like he like sort of, you know, detonated Sidney Powell on his show. I mean he was like the only person at Fox, it seemed like, who wasn’t going along with all the, you know the election was fake stuff initially. Now, like, he doesn’t say anything about it. And you know when he does say stuff that kind of is tangentially related to it. Like the way he handled the ICE, the ICE stuff in Minnesota I thought was pretty telling. You know, he’s not, he like, you know, he passed like the, you got over the lowest bar of basically expressing horror and empathy about the killings of Pretti and Good, which you know a lot of conservative pundits did not do. So I guess credit to him for that. But then he immediately—
Alex Wagner: It’s a low bar.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, seriously low bar, but then he immediately changed the focus to the protesters and how. You know, they were paid agitators and this, you know, and they’re put up to it by lefty groups and, and, you know, lefty politicians, and they are trying to bring chaos to the entire United States, and they’re against whiteness and they’re against Christianity. I mean, that kind of stuff, it makes me think that if and when these efforts to kind of hijack the elections come, like, I don’t think he’s going to be standing up saying this is bad—
Alex Wagner: We’re doing anything to disabuse people, theorists who are trying to aid Trump in his—
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, I mean, I guess it’ll be interesting to see if he’s like an active, you know, kind of promoter of them or if he just, you know, tries to change the focus in some way.
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Alex Wagner: We talked a little bit about the Vance. You touched on the partnership, the intellectual partnership between Vance and Carlson. I wonder if you could talk more about that because it seems to me, and you’ve said this on this podcast and others that Tucker doesn’t see himself as a media guy. He sees himself as the movement guy.
Jason Zengerle: And Vance is like the vehicle right now, I think.
Alex Wagner: Well, but also, couldn’t Tucker be the vehicle? I mean, I know everybody’s wondering, like, is, or, and this book is written at an opportune time, like is Tucker going to be a candidate? And how would that work? Because Don Jr. would be forced to make a Sophie’s choice.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: Right? Like, how could he choose?
Jason Zengerle: That would be very tough for Don Jr.
Alex Wagner: Very intense love triangle.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah. Well, I think for Don Jr’s sake, it’s probably not going to come to a head anytime soon. I don’t think that Tucker has the fire in the belly or whatever you want to call it [laughter] to be president.
Alex Wagner: What does he have, though? He has the grievance. He has…
Jason Zengerle: No, and he has ambition.
Alex Wagner: And he has the ambition. Yeah.
Jason Zengerle: He definitely has the ambition. I mean, he has like an ideological project and he has a he has a vision for this country that he wants to see realized. But I don’t think he feels he has to be president to do that. Like he wants I mean I think I think if JD Vance can, you know, like he’ll be very happy and probably relieved because he wouldn’t have to do it himself. I mean, I think the two things that could sort of, you know, spark some kind of falling out with Vance would be one, like Vance, you know getting off the bus and be like, well, maybe I don’t want to, you know, sort of have to suck up to Nick Fuentes to be president. Or number two, and I think this is probably more likely would be Tucker realizing like J.D. Vance doesn’t really have what it takes to actually get elected president. He’s not, he doesn’t really—
Alex Wagner: Right, he can’t order donuts. You can’t order donuts.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, no, there’s something. I mean, there is, you compare them especially to Trump. Like, and this is where I think Tucker like would be a, you know, a pretty like plausible presidential candidate, especially someone coming after Trump. Like he has charisma, he has entertainment, um, sort of talent, you know, in a way that like Vance and really any sort of Republican politician I look at these days, like doesn’t.
Alex Wagner: I can believe that he seems to have conviction.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, no, he believes this stuff. He believes it a lot more than Trump does, I think. [laughs] And I could just sort of see him saying like, all right, well, if no one else can do it, then I’ll do it myself. But I think it would have to come to that basically, him not being able to find like a vessel that he could sort of pour himself into.
Alex Wagner: I wonder, I’m going to make a parallel here and you tell me if you think this is like a good one or not, but in the way that Bannon is kind of Trump’s yago, like sitting on the sidelines in his podcast and trying to give Trump markers for the center of gravity as far as where the conservative movement is, I wonder if a similar relationship doesn’t exist or could be emerge between Vance and Carlson, if Vance was the nominee or it’s hard for me to say this, even President, like… Is he the sort of Rasputin of the court? You know, is he, does he see the power in that? And also, like, what a sign of the times that, like Bannon’s sort of white populism has now transmogrified into Tucker Carlson’s, like, straight up anti-Semitic white nationalist, like, racism. Whoa! Making me miss Steve Bannon!
Jason Zengerle: I know, seriously. No, that’s a really good analogy. I hadn’t thought of that, but I think you’re right—
Alex Wagner: I feel like it, it seems like that, right? Like it’s like your guy on the outside that has, knows the hearts and minds kind of of where people are at.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, I don’t know if Tucker thinks of himself as kind of the 4D chess player that Bannon does.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Jason Zengerle: I think you’re actually, yeah, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
Alex Wagner: And Don Jr., can we talk a little bit about the relationship? I’m always fascinated in the Trump children and like, you know, the degree to which they can unplug from the mainframe and act as independent operators.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, I think I think Tucker and Don Jr. I think like there was a period where Tucker was like much better friends with Don Jr than he was with with Trump senior. I think he I think he and Don Jr like get along really well. You know, they have this like hunting thing that they they bond over. And I mean, after, you know, after the 2020 election. Um, when, when Tucker was really down on Trump and really for the first year or so, you know, and Trump was trying to reach out to him and Tucker was stiff arming him, you know, like Don Jr was the one who kind of like brokered the, uh, the rapprochement like went up to Maine and went hunting with Tucker and, you know, I think sort of said, my dad wants to see you and then Tucker eventually went down to New Jersey. Um, but I think that, I think Don in some ways is like, he’s like the real Maga guy. Um, more than more than his dad. I mean, yeah, like they’re- There’s that testimony that Bannon gave, I forget to what Senate, in one of the congressional committees—
Alex Wagner: Probably his contempt of Congress. I don’t know whatever how many times has he testified go ahead.
Jason Zengerle: But he was talking, he was back, he’s talking about Don Jr. And the meeting he tried to set up with the people who had dirt on Hillary. And he, and Bannon says something like, Don Jr is someone who believes everything he reads in Breitbart. And I mean that well. It was just like, but that really is like that. Don Jr’s way more—
Alex Wagner: He’s fully red-pilled.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, he is like truly red-pilled and obviously so conversant in this online stuff that, you know, and that’s the world that Tucker and JD Vance now kind of inhabit.
Alex Wagner: Ladies and gentlemen, your modern day Republican Party. I got to ask you, I mean, I know we were evaluating him as a sort of political figure, a movement figure, but to the degree that institutional media still exists, and I say this as we speak on a Crooked Podcast and we talk about a book that was released on Crooked Media Books, like the, I have to ask, this is sort of adjacent to the book, but when you look at the Ellison’s taking over CBS and you look a Bezos gutting the Washington Post, What influence? If any, do you think Tucker, and maybe even Megyn Kelly, spinning off and doing their own thing and proving there’s an audience, like showing, I guess, these people who are inclined to believe this, that there’s a real audience, in terms of young, right-wing minds and hearts that can be convinced and want the content. Like how much do you I guess he influences what’s happening in terms of media and the right word, lurch? And I would argue, atrophy.
Jason Zengerle: I think to a good degree, I mean, you’ve already seen Fox, you know, try to buy back, you know, the Megyn Kelly and Tucker podcasts. I mean the CBS ones, like, maybe a little bit more complicated just because, you know, Tucker and Bari, despite now being related by marriage, are, you know, kind of at each other’s throats because Tucker, like accuses her of being [?], but—
Alex Wagner: Right, that’s the whole anti-Semitic, that is the conundrum of the antisemitic thing.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, so I don’t know how that fits in. But no, I do think that there is this definitely sense among like institutional media that the energy and the, especially, and the younger sort of audiences are to be found in this kind of new world of streaming and podcasting and companies that are not sort of hemmed in by all these kind of legacy. You know, rules and structures and the like. And yeah, I think seeing Tucker’s success has got to influence them in terms of what directions they go in. I mean, they’re still gonna be, they’re not gonna go as far as he—
Alex Wagner: They’re not going to be maybe talking about great replacement theory yet, but I, yeah. I mean, I also think it’s, it’s just how far right the pendulum has swung, gives cover to both sidesism when it comes to, oh, I don’t know what happened in Minnesota, right? Like there’s just that he has been important in shifting the Overton window. I never say that phrase. I leave that to Chris Hayes usually, but it seems apropos in this case.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, no, very, that’s very true. Yeah.
Alex Wagner: Does his, does his distaste for like elites and Washington DC, where he used to live before he, um, went to the Isle of Elba in Maine. Um, does this distaste extend to institutional media? I mean, I just think about like when, when the Washington post is crumbling, is that a scalp for Tucker Carlson?
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, I think so. I think he’s cheering that on. I mean, he’s probably conflicted because he hates Jeff Bezos or he thinks, I mean he’s not someone who’s gonna throw in with like the tech oligarchs and stuff. I think has questions about them that are similar, I think, to Bannon’s questions. But yeah, I thing he has a sort of tear it all down mentality. I mean this is a guy who used to be, I think used to have like a weekly chat on the Washington Post website.
Alex Wagner: We used to have an MSNBC show and a CNN show, like, dude.
Jason Zengerle: That’s true. Yeah
Alex Wagner: Does he still wear bow ties?
Jason Zengerle: No, no, no.
Alex Wagner: He doesn’t right?
Jason Zengerle: This is actually it’s been no after John Stewart. He took it off. And he’s it’s funny because like the cover of the book has him with a bow tie. And I was like arguing with the the art people and, you know, saying, he hasn’t worn one in 20 years. And they’re like, yeah, people think of him in one.
Alex Wagner: I just always, he’s in my lizard brain as, I mean obviously on his podcast he doesn’t wear them, but I still think of him as someone who will appear in a bow tie.
Jason Zengerle: He wears a rep tie. He always wears a blue, it’s usually like a blue and red stripe or a blue and like yellow stripe. I mean, although he’s obviously a huge populace now, like he still plays, he leans into his waspishness. I mean he’s basically playing the role of class traitor. You know, he has like the rep tie and the Rolex and he actually like drinks from a Perrier bottle. And it’s very similar to what Trump does, because I think that gives him authenticity in the eyes of the audience, because he can say. You know, I was in the room with these people, I knew all of them and I knew the bad things they were saying about you and I’m here to tell you about that.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, just like he can be, I mean, build a, you know, $400 million ballroom at the precise point that affordability is a major issue with the American public because he’s the rich guy that knows how to game the system and make America great again. Do you have, I know this book focuses more on, this is sort of professional development, but I wonder if Tucker the man, like we know his mother abandoned him. This is the origin story, being abandoned by your mother. That’s where it all fucking starts. He’s still married to his wife. He doesn’t play golf because he likes to have sex. He tells people, ha ha ha, actually, but true.
Jason Zengerle: I thought that was a pretty good line.
Alex Wagner: It is just like hated by all the right people Viktor Orban. Um, the does he have a social circle that he interacts with anymore? I mean, I know he used to be kind of like the party trick at Washington dinner parties But like he’s on these islands surely he hangs out with Trump, but does he has a circle of people who ever challenge him?
Jason Zengerle: I don’t think they ever challenge him. But his circle, yeah, it’s like, his circle is what you would imagine, just it’s the Trumps, it the O’Vaughn, it’s that crew. It’s the people in sort of the Trump administration, it is, I mean, I think it’s J.D. Vance. And then it’s this counter-elite that they have created. The Peter Thiel’s of the world, and that’s the sort of ocean that he swims in now. Um, he’s, you know, he traded in kind of one elite for another.
Alex Wagner: I have to ask you, on behalf of concerned citizens all over this country, but in your witnessing this evolution and this push towards the extremities of conservatism, which I would argue are no longer even conservatist, but just straight up anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and white nationalism, could you ever foresee a reverse? Could you ever foresee Tucker chilling the fuck out and maybe- deprogramming himself a little bit from the Maga cults, do you think such a thing is possible? Like, given what you know about this man and his convictions and to the degree to which he’s been red-pilled.
Jason Zengerle: I mean, he’s pretty, he walked pretty far out there on the tree limb, right? [laughter] I mean it’s, it’s hard to imagine him coming back. Um, it seems like, you know, if this stuff ultimately, you know, gets repudiated and the movement fails, um, I think, I think it would be hard for him to, to reinvent himself. And that’s the only.
Alex Wagner: One more time.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah. I just think he’s, he has gone far enough and people, people’s memories will be long enough that it’s it’s he, he has come back into like the embrace of, you know, elites multiple times, um, you knowing they, they vote, you, like, I mean, it’s in the book, but you know the, when he started the Daily Call or his website, the way, like. Jake Tapper and people like that like rallied around it and were supporting him, you know, after he’d kind of been in the wilderness a little bit, like, you now, it sort of spoke to kind of the, the club-ishness, right? Like, I think that’s over, like that no one’s going to welcome him back now. So I think he, and I think, he knows that. I think he knows that he’s, you know, he’s sort of severed any kind of connection that he’d had to that world. So I can’t imagine he would, he would try to come back to it. I mean, maybe he’d reposition himself, you know, on the far right and find some other vehicle, but like coming back.
Alex Wagner: Hungary.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, you know, he could go join Roger air in Budapest, you know, I mean, seriously, or like Cutter, right? Didn’t he just like, he’s going to move to, did you see that?
Alex Wagner: There’s always Cutter, no, I didn’t.
Jason Zengerle: Oh, he apparently is going to buy a house there.
Alex Wagner: Oh. No, that makes sense.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah. And he really likes Saudi Arabia. He talks about how it’s so free. So, I mean, yeah, you can sort of, I mean—
Alex Wagner: That’s a great guy.
Jason Zengerle: Yeah, they’re like Idi Amin kind of parallels you could draw, maybe, but.
Alex Wagner: Sure, cool. No, this seems like a good play. That’s a good final chapter, isn’t it? Just going to Saudi Arabia. Have you heard from Tucker since the book came out?
Jason Zengerle: I have not, no, no. I saw, he gave a quote last week to Michael Calderon saying that he didn’t even know it was out and he doesn’t know why anyone would buy it because he’s not that interesting. So that’s all I’ve seen. But I think he’s over in Saudi right now or in Jordan. So maybe when he gets back, I’m not sure.
Alex Wagner: When you think of him and you are a student of him, is this the inevitable? I mean, the reason the book is so relevant. I mean it would be relevant, I would argue, all the time just because Tucker Carlson is a singular figure in American life. But it really feels like he is a placeholder for the Republican Party and witnessing how it goes from this kind of bow-tie George Will like inside the Beltway. We can negotiate things together to this full-throated crazy like edgelord. White nationalism is also the story of Tucker Carlson’s evolution. When you wrote the book, how much were you thinking not just about the man, but about the party?
Jason Zengerle: Oh, I was totally thinking about the party. I mean, I like, and Tucker’s interesting, but he’s not that interesting. And I could not, I did not want to write a book about him. So like, you know, when you talk about the stuff with his mom, like, I mean I obviously mentioned it in the book, but it’s not, I don’t spend a lot of time putting him on the couch. Like I’m interested in him as a professional. Um, because you know, the, just the, his professional journey kind of tells and his political journey kind tells this much larger story and the institutions that he helped create and were a part of, like they tell this story as well. So that, yeah, that was the whole, that was the idea behind the book. I mean, he is a good character. I mean and he’s, you know he’s a compelling figure and. I mean I, I guess I’m a little surprised that he is as central to our politics at, at this very moment that he then, you know. I mean, I didn’t think he would be having, you know, like a New York Times front page story every month about kind of his latest thing. And then the way that the Nick Fuentes interview like fractured the conservative movement [both speaking] when Donald Trump sat down with him, it didn’t do this. I didn’t think he’d be quite so central in that respect. But at the same time, you now, I think so much of what’s going on right now is these people trying to and getting their elbows out and trying to position for what what MAGA is going to be when Trump leaves. And that’s, that’s where you see and Tucker is going be a huge, you know, player in that fight. And he might not win. I mean, but he certainly is representing a side. And I think, you’re probably one of the one or two most important people in the fight. So, so that you know I think that’s why like he’s important to pay attention to and also to like take seriously, you know, I think like you.
Alex Wagner: Yeah. For sure.
Jason Zengerle: He’s not sort of a sideshow figure. He’s actually like very important.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, I totally, I could not agree more. It is a really good read. It’s a very, like I said, it’s super timely and it is, I dare say, entertaining, which I hate using the word entertainment with Tucker Carlson, because I think what he does is so venomous and deadly serious and destructive, but, you know.
Jason Zengerle: He does it with flair.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, he does, certainly does it with flair. Jason, congrats on the book. And thank you for offering your thoughts on all of it. It’s great to have you on the show.
Jason Zengerle: Thanks a lot for having me on. I appreciate it.
Alex Wagner: That is our show for this week. As always, if you’ve been impacted directly by the Trump administration and its policies, send us an email or a one-minute voice note at runawaycountry@crooked.com and we may be in touch to feature your story. A huge thank you to everyone who’s written in already. Last but not least, please don’t forget to check out the show and our rapid response videos on our YouTube channel, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner. Runaway Country is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alyona Minkovski. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacy Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landes. Ben Hethcoat is our video producer and Matt DeGroot is our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adriene Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Katie Long is our Executive Producer of Development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writer’s Guild of America East.
