...Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice We dont judge them by group, and we dont judge them on their race, Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continents high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever. Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyds murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as criminal mobs. Companies like Angies List and Papa Johns dropped their ads. The following month, Tucker Carlson Tonight became the highest-rated cable news show in history. ... Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlsons on-air technique gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers partner in victimhood has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to legacy Americans, a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: Tucker Carlson Tonight has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that countrys Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as the great replacement to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing more obedient voters from the third world to replace the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.
Tucker is ultimately on our side, Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his podcast last spring. He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.
That pattern is no accident. To a degree not broadly appreciated outside Fox, Tucker Carlson Tonight is the apex of a programming and editorial strategy that transformed the network during the Trump era, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists. Like the Republican Party itself, Fox has sought to wring rising returns out of a slowly declining audience: the older white conservatives who make up Mr. Trumps base and much of Foxs core viewership. To minimize content that might tempt them to change the channel, Fox News has sidelined Trump-averse or left-leaning contributors. It has lost some of its most respected news journalists, most recently Chris Wallace, the longtime host of Foxs flagship Sunday show. During the same period, according to former employees and journalists there, Fox has leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence, often plucked from local news sites and turbocharged by the channels vast digital news operation. Network executives ordered up such coverage so relentlessly during the Trump years that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: brown menace.
While Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of Tucker Carlson Tonight as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, Mr. Carlsons on-air provocations have long been something else: part of a painstaking, data-driven experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Foxs profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.
According to three former Fox employees, Mr. Carlson was among the networks most avid consumers of what are known as minute-by-minutes ratings data on an audiences real-time ebb and flow. He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up, said a former employee who worked frequently with Mr. Carlson.
Network executives soon began applying the approach to the daytime news shows. They pitched it as Moneyball for television: an audience-first approach to deciding what to cover and how to cover it.
Journalists on Foxs daytime shows discerned a pattern to what the audience didnt like: segments featuring Foxs own reporters, stories deemed unfavorable to Mr. Trump, left-leaning or independent guests. Immigration, on the other hand, was a hit. ... Here is the Tucker Carlson Tonight playbook: Go straight for the third rail, be it race, immigration or another hot-button issue; harvest the inevitable backlash; return the next evening to skewer critics for how they responded. Then, do it all again. This feedback loop drove up ratings and boosted loyalty to Fox and Mr. Carlson.
What it did not do was endear Mr. Carlson to advertisers. As blue-chip sponsors fled, Fox filled the space with in-house promos using Mr. Carlsons popularity to push other Fox shows and direct-to-consumer brands like MyPillow, whose chief executive is a major promoter of Mr. Trumps stolen-election lie.
Last May, after promoting the white supremacist replacement theory, Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018. But he brought in almost twice as much money.