The Ground Beneath His Feet
By Nice Alex Pareene profile of Tucker Carlson:
The Daily Caller, the site he launched with a promise to offer a new model for conservative journalism, is primarily a catalog of sleazy traffic-baiting aggregated Web garbage (“Top 10: Most beautiful ‘most beautiful’ women [SLIDESHOW]“), ancient relics of online commentary with nowhere else left to publish (Ann Coulter, Mickey Kaus), and overblown scandal-mongering headlines that promise much more than they can deliver. In other words it is like a mean-spirited parody of a conservative version of the pre-AOL Huffington Post, with a healthy dose, recently, of attention-grabbing race baiting. This is not the sort of thing Carlson used to be known for.
The title (“The Downward Spiral of Tucker Carlson”) isn’t quite right, though; the issue isn’t so much that Carlson has spiraled as it is that the incentives for conservative punditry have shifted. There is very limited (not completely absent, but very limited) space for the smartish conservative pundit who occasionally tries to speak truth to (movement conservative) power. Carlson occupied part of that space a decade ago, but the ground shifted and he was left in an untenable position. A graceful slide into irrelevance wasn’t in Tucker’s plans, and so the Daily Caller makes every effort to outfox Fox, out-breitbart Breitbart, etc.