Five nights a week, Tucker Carlson uses his platform on Fox News to tell millions of viewers what he believes: that “the world’s poor” make the United States “dirtier and more divided,” that “the American Nazi Party and the KKK don’t really exist in a meaningful [sense],” that Alaska renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous People’s Day was an “attack on civilization.” These are the familiar politics of white grievance, and they have been profitable for Carlson. So whether he believes the things he says or simply repeats them like a trained pet to collect millions of dollars every year is not really an interesting question, yet it is the premise of nearly 2,000 words of reporting in The Atlantic.



Former Atlantic staff writer and current New York Times reporter Elaina Plott’s latest offering, published over the weekend, is a profile of Carlson. The piece uses a soft touch throughout, and even the headline—“What Does Tucker Carlson Believe?”—treats him more as an object of curiosity than the bigot with a powerful national platform that he is. After an introduction that seeks to distinguish Carlson for his willingness to criticize some Republicans, the piece moves to the question of Carlson’s politics and the white nationalism of his worldview. To set it up, Plott writes that, “for a time, the question could be written off as unserious, a voguish desire to ascribe racism to anyone who might not support increased immigration.” (The obvious question here: written off as unserious by whom?) Plott then concedes that, judged by his recent work, the Fox News megastar has at least partially squandered that excuse. This comes just after an anecdote in which Carlson complains to her that at his fishing spot on the Potomac River, “litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants.” On this at least, Plott pushes back. “Wait, how do you know they’re—,” she asks, before Carlson cuts her off: “Because I’m there, I watch it.”

On first read, Plott and her editors choosing to include this moment in the opening of the piece would seem like a hopeful direction, one that probes Carlson’s long-standing racist and revanchist views and answers the question posed by the headline in the affirmative: You already know what Tucker Carlson believes. Instead, the ensuing 1,500 words amount to little more than free copy space for Carlson to laugh at quotes Plott reads to him from other conservatives and to revel in just how far this son of unearned wealth has come. (For those seeking an example of what an honest Tucker Carlson profile looks like, one that charts the younger journalist who defended segregation to the older talking head ginning up white resentment on Fox News every night, try this one from 2018 by Columbia Journalism Review’s Lyz Lenz.)

This is more or less Plott’s thing: Last year, she offered a feather pillow of a profile to Heidi Cruz a month before Senator Ted Cruz, her husband, narrowly defeated Beto O’Rourke in the 2018 midterms. Two months later, she gushingly reviewed a book that called born-millionaire George H.W. Bush “one of us,” and defended the very access journalism that her entire schtick rests upon. Then in April, Plott published a plushy profile of Ivanka Trump, sourced by an off-the-record chat with the first daughter, which amounted to a puff piece absolving her of almost all responsibility for choosing to work in her father’s administration.

Though arriving from a repeat offender, this style of reporting is not unique to Plott or The Atlantic. You see it everywhere: A story by a (usually white) journalist at an “objective” national publication claiming to reveal something profound about an open racist or some style of bigot, while actually concealing the true stakes of the issue they’re covering.