Tucker Carlson: US journalists are ‘cowards’ and ‘cringing animals’

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Martin Pengelly in New York
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Mainstream US journalists are “cowards”, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on Friday, without naming any such reporters whom he also called “cringing animals not worthy of respect”.

Related: Tucker Carlson condemned by LGBTQ+ activists after yearbook page goes viral

The primetime host also called others in his chosen field “small-minded, status-obsessed, insecure, not that bright, just not impressive”.

“It just makes me sick,” he said. “I really hate them.”

Carlson was speaking to Outkick, a sports and pop culture website. His complaints included that mainstream journalists’ work was not “aimed upwards”.

“I just can’t overstate how disgusted I am,” he said, “not simply by the details of the lying of the medium, but disgusted by the emphasis. The media is basically Praetorian Guard for the ruling class, the bodyguards for Jeff Bezos. That’s the opposite of what we should have.

“I really hate them for it, I’ll be honest.”

Carlson has been broadly supportive of Donald Trump in and out of power, last October famously hosting a bizarre interview after the then president recovered from a bout with Covid-19.

One Washington Post columnist called Carlson “sycophancy-adjacent rather than entirely immersed in the MAGAverse”, a relative distancing made possible because “Trump shares many of his core philosophies, like preserving institutional power for white Americans”.

Carlson regularly espouses the racist “replacement theory”, which says Democrats encourage immigration in order to win elections. Recent calls for him to be fired for doing so were rebuffed by the Murdochs – the immigrant family that owns Fox News.

On Friday, the Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent accused Carlson of peddling “a monumental scam with potential real world implications”.

A recent poll, Sargent wrote, “found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about ‘ensuring the country’s survival as we know it’” and that “there is a ‘real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege’”.

Carlson is seen in some quarters as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024, should Trump chose not to run.

In an echo of controversy over comments in which he said immigration made America “dirtier”, the Fox News host also told Outkick: “Unrestrained mass immigration has also put a huge strain on the natural world.

“Just the amount of pollution and litter and destruction that’s generated by the movement of hundreds of thousands of people, unrestrained, across the border. That’s not a small thing to me. But you never hear that. I’ve never heard anybody mention that. And it’s so awful.”

Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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