The dark backstory of Fox News and Tucker Carlson. A nonpartisan analysis.

In the wake of the recent firing of America’s most-watched cable news host by Fox News, many people are wondering: who really is Tucker Carlson, and why was he fired?

From William Fox to Marc Rich to Rupert Murdoch

Fox News belongs to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, which goes back to the original Fox Film Corporation (aka the Fox Film Studios). Like most Hollywood film studios, Fox Film was founded, in 1915, by a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe: the Hungarian Wilhelm Fuchs (aka William Fox).

After a long series of mergers and takeovers, the 20th Century Fox movie studio was acquired, in 1981, by American-Jewish billionaire industrialist Marvin Davis and American-Israeli billionaire commodities trader and Mossad operative Marcell David Reich (aka Marc Rich).

In 1983 Marc Rich was indicted by the US government on 65 criminal charges and fled to Switzerland. Thus, in 1985 Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch acquired the Fox film studio and began developing the Fox TV network, which in 1996 led to the founding of Fox News.

Murdoch himself is not Jewish, but he is a committed supporter of Israel and, as the Jewish Algemeiner newspaper noted in 2011, “one would be hard pressed to find a non-Jew who has been honored by more Jewish organizations than Rupert Murdoch”. Nevertheless, in 2012 Murdoch was criticized for asking, “Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?”

“Perception management”

In 1983, Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, asked Murdoch to support the US government’s “perception management” operation concerning the CIA’s ongoing Contra war in Nicaragua and the stationing of US nuclear missiles in Europe. In exchange, Murdoch was offered technological support for developing the first global satellite television network, WorldNet, and Reagan rescinded the 1940s “Fairness Doctrine” that had required political balance in broadcasting.

It was Casey who famously stated, in February 1981, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” Murdoch was introduced to Reagan by Murdoch’s then-lawyer, Roy Cohn, who at the time was advising not only a young Donald Trump, but also key figures of American-Jewish organized crime – the Hollywood branch of which had helped install B-movie actor Ronald Reagan as the 40th US President.

The CIA “perception management” operation on Nicaragua was overseen by the US National Security Council and assisted by the US Information Agency (USIA), which controlled the global US propaganda broadcasting network, including radio stations such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Liberty, all of which initially were funded by the CIA.

A “freedom fighter” and a CIA applicant

At the time, Richard Carlson, the father of Tucker Carlson, was director of Voice of America and associate director of the US Information Agency. While Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and Richard Carlson’s USIA were producing propaganda in support of the CIA Contra war in Nicaragua, young Tucker Carlson went to Nicaragua as a “freedom fighter” and supported the Contras.

Shortly thereafter, Tucker Carlson formally applied to become a member of the CIA but, apparently, his application was denied. His father then proposed he “consider journalism” as “they’ll take anybody”. Tucker Carlson’s CIA application was revealed in 2017 by The New Yorker.

The CIA Contra war caused about 50,000 casualties and led to the infamous Iran-Contra affair. When US investigative journalist Garry Webb exposed, in 1996, that the CIA had secretly funded the Contra war by importing crack cocaine from Colombia to black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and other US cities, Carlson and many other journalists attacked Webb and defended the CIA.

By that time, Tucker Carlson was working at the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine, which was owned by CIA “propaganda recruit” Rupert Murdoch and edited by neoconservative writer Bill Kristol. In 1997 Kristol would co-found the notorious “Project for the New American Century”, which discussed the possibility of a “new Pearl Harbor” one year ahead of September 11, 2001.

Unsurprisingly, some people have wondered if Carlson might in fact have been a “Company Man”.

Meanwhile in the UK

In Britain, Rupert Murdoch already owned several large newspapers, including The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times, and News of the World. In 2011, it was exposed that employees of News of the World had been engaged, over many years, in phone hacking and bribery. Under pressure from politicians and the public, Murdoch decided to shut down the entire newspaper.

Murdoch’s main competitor in Britain was Czech-Jewish media mogul Jan Hoch aka Robert Maxwell, owner of the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror. In 1991, Israeli intelligence whistleblower Ari Ben-Menashe and American-Jewish journalist Seymour Hersh exposed Maxwell as a Mossad operative involved in nuclear espionage and the sale of bugged software to various governments. A few weeks later, Maxwell mysteriously died on his yacht.

After Maxwell’s death, his youngest daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, teamed up with the late financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. In 2019, Ari Ben-Menashe stated that Epstein, too, was an Israeli intelligence operative and a handler or blackmailer of politicians, royals and executives.

An “out-of-the-closet elitist”

Back in the US, Tucker Carlson joined CNN in 2000. That same year, it was revealed that US Army psy-ops experts worked at CNN and had “helped in the production of news” during the Kosovo war against Serbia. One year later, former CIA intern and Vanderbilt heir Anderson Cooper began working at CNN. During the next two decades, Cooper would cover many fake terrorist attacks run by the CIA and other agencies, such as the notoriously staged “Boston Marathon bombing” in 2013.

Tucker Carlson is not quite a Vanderbilt heir but, in 1979, when Tucker was 10, his father remarried Patricia Swanson, heiress to the Swanson Frozen Food company fortune and niece of Senator William Fulbright. In a radio interview in 2008, one year before joining Fox News, Tucker Carlson described himself as a “trust fund baby” and “extraordinarily loaded just from money I inherited”.

On the same radio show, Carlson described himself as an “out-of-the-closet elitist”: “I don’t run around pretending to be a man of the people; I’m absolutely not a man of the people, at all.”

“Murdoch’s bitch” and Hunter’s friend

In 2003, then CNN news host Tucker Carlson, still wearing a bowtie, said about Fox news host Bill O’Reilly:

“Bill O’Reilly is very talented. () But I think there’s a deep phoniness at the center of his schtick. It’s built on the perception that he is the character he plays; he is everyman. He’s not right-wing, he’s a populist fighting for you against the powers that be. () And that’s great as a schtick. But I’m just saying that the moment it is revealed not to be true, it’s over! () Because the whole thing is predicated on the fact that he is who he says he is. And nobody is that person. Especially not somebody who makes many millions a year.”

13 years later, millionaire Tucker Carlson would replace O’Reilly at Fox News.

In a 2010 radio interview, Tucker, now at Fox, responded affirmatively to a question by the interviewer: “I’m 100 percent [Rupert Murdoch’s] bitch. Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”

In 2021, leaked emails revealed that back in 2014, Carlson asked his (then) friend, Hunter Biden, for a letter of recommendation to Georgetown University for his son; in 2015, Carlson intervened on behalf of Hunter Biden to influence a British news story about one of Hunter Biden’s first sex scandals.

“The control apparatus”

The above backstory notwithstanding, it is indeed true that in recent months and years, Tucker Carlson has challenged – to some extent – several bogus establishment narratives.

This includes the RussiaGate conspiracy hoax; the dirty war on Syria and some of the false-flag chemical attacks; the proxy war in Ukraine; the stage-managed January 6 insurrection; the US and global response to the covid pandemic; the JFK assassination and the Watergate saga; and, most recently, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on American news media.

In a March 2023 interview with independent Canadian journalists, Carlson went even further and made the following statements:

“That is a big part of the revelation that has changed my life: the media are part of the control apparatus. () I spent my whole life in that world. Not only are they part of the problem, but I spent most of my life being part of the problem. Like defending the Iraq war, I actually did that. () I just didn’t see it, at all. () It’s their only purpose. They’re not here to inform you! () Even on the big things that really matter, like the economy and the war and Covid, things that really matter and will affect you. No, their job is not to inform you, they’re working for the small group of people who actually run the world. They’re their servants, they’re the Praetorian Guard. And we should treat them with maximum contempt because they have earned it.”

After that interview, several people were already wondering how much longer Carlson will or can stay at Fox News. In the week before his firing, Carlson railed against the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on US news media and did an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father and uncle both were very likely killed in an Israeli-American intelligence plot.

The firing of Carlson came only one day after Fox News settled an $800 million lawsuit by voting machine company Dominion. Some media suggested Carlson was to blame for this lawsuit, but this wasn’t true: Carlson never supported Trump’s 2020 election claims (even though some important questions do in fact remain unresolved). Rather, leaked internal messages revealed that Carlson criticized Fox News management decisions, which may have played a role in his firing.

Beyond “perception management”

Will Swanson heir, CIA applicant and “out-of-the-closet elitist” Tucker Carlson, freed from the shackles of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, become a fearless independent journalist?

Carlson previously founded a semi-independent political news website, The Daily Caller, together with a former college room mate who later became an aide to US Vice President Dick Cheney.

Clearly, it is still a big step from semi-independent journalism to truly independent journalism.

You have been reading:
Fox News, Tucker Carlson, and the American Empire.
An analysis by Swiss Policy Research.
100% bot-free content.

Annex

1) Rupert Murdoch and Ronald Reagan (1983)

President Ronald Reagan with Rupert Murdoch and USIA director Charles Wick (1983).

2) Media ties to the Obama Administration (2014)

3) The six largest media corporations (2000)