The day after Tucker Carlson lost his job at Fox News, he got some praise from a surprising source: the progressive magazine The American Prospect.
The piece may have been titled “The Smuggest Man on Air,” but its thrust was decidedly more admiring of the host. Journalists Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein wrote that Carlson was “skilled at skewering comfortable pieties on the left and right” and that his “insistent distrust of his powerful guests acts as a solvent to authority.”
They praised Carlson’s criticisms of free market conservative dogma and the US foreign policy establishment, and only briefly mentioned what they termed his “obsessively nativist” messaging, which they said “alienated viewers who might otherwise have embraced his populist perspective.”
The backlash from some quarters of the left was swift.
Author Zachary Carter called the article “generally revolting.” Writer Kathleen Geier opined that the Prospect writers either must be “too dumb” to notice Carlson’s bigotry or shared his views. “Disgraceful and stupid,” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo tweeted.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie called the article “shoddy and unconvincing,” said Carlson’s show “was praised by literal nazis for its messaging,” and tagged the Prospect’s top editor, David Dayen, to ask why he published it. (Dayen soon issued a semi-apologetic editor’s note, saying the piece “fell short,” that he bore responsibility, and that he’d publish a response from other staffers soon.)
But, Dayen’s contrition notwithstanding, some on the left defended the piece. “This is the only piece on the left trying to understand how Tucker Carlson fit into policy discourse,” anti-monopoly activist Matt Stoller tweeted. “So of course most people hate it.”
The American Prospect has long championed a progressive agenda, with alternately wonky and crusading bents, and has helped launch the careers of many now-prominent…
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