Tucker Carlson Calls Journalists ‘Animals.’ He’s Also Their Best Source.

His platform on Fox News made him a big player in Donald Trump’s circle. Off camera, he shapes the coverage of Trump’s world and Fox’s own internal politics.

CreditCredit...Brandon Celi

By Ben SmithJune 20, 2021, 9:05 p.m. ET

Last month, I texted Tucker Carlson to ask him a question that was on my mind: “Did you get vaccinated?”

“When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position?” he replied. “We can trade intimate details.”

Then we argued back and forth about vaccines, and he ended the conversation with a friendly invitation to return to his show. “Always a good time.”

One question you may be asking, if you are a New York Times reader, is: Why are you exchanging texts with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who recently described the media at large as “cringing animals who are not worthy of respect”?

And if you are a Tucker Carlson viewer, you may also be asking: How can the guy who tells you every night that the media is lying be texting with the enemy?

The answer is one of Washington’s open secrets. Mr. Carlson, a proud traitor to the elite political class, spends his time when he’s not denouncing the liberal media trading gossip with them. He’s the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr. Carlson himself). I won’t talk here about any off-the-record conversations I may have had with him. But 16 other journalists (none from The Times; it would put my colleagues in a weird position if I asked them) told me on background that he has been, as three of them put it, “a great source.”

“In Trump’s Washington, Tucker Carlson is a primary supersecret source,” the media writer and Trump chronicler Michael Wolff writes in his forthcoming collection of essays, “Too Famous.” Mr. Wolff, who thanked Mr. Carlson in the acknowledgments of his 2018 book, “Fire and Fury,” explained, “I know this because I know what he has told me, and I can track his exquisite, too-good-not-to-be-true gossip through unsourced reports and as it often emerges into accepted wisdom.” ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/business/media/tucker-carlson.html