Archives for April 2022

In early June 2020, Mr. Carlson told his audience that the Black Lives Matter protests were “definitely not about Black lives” and to “remember that when they come for you.” The next evening, as Fox’s public relations team insisted Mr. Carlson’s comment was being mischaracterized, Mr. Carlson leaned in. “The mob came for us — irony of ironies,” he told Fox viewers. “They spent the last 24 hours trying to force the show off the air for good. They won’t succeed in that, thankfully. We work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they’re not intimidated.”

Off-camera, Mr. Carlson could be less defiant. In a conversation that spring with Eric Owens, one of his former employees at The Daily Caller, he worried that the controversy over his show had made it difficult for his children to get jobs and internships; he worried that his younger children wouldn’t get into college. “It’s not right for this to affect my family, and literally affect my children’s future,” Mr. Carlson said, according to Mr. Owens.

But it’s less clear whether the attacks significantly affected Fox’s bottom line: To compensate for the lost advertising, Fox turned “Tucker Carlson Tonight” into a promotional engine for the network itself. It replaced the fleeing sponsors with a torrent of in-house promos, leveraging Mr. Carlson’s popularity to drive viewers to other, more advertiser-friendly offerings. By early 2019, roughly a fifth of all advertising “impressions” on the show were from in-house ads, according to data from the analytics company iSpot.tv. That summer, as Fox fended off criticism of Mr. Carlson’s “hoax” comments, the proportion climbed to more than a third. (A Fox spokeswoman said the actual proportions were lower, but declined to provide specific figures.) “Fox is basically an enormous loyalty brand,” said Jason Damata, the chief executive officer of Fabric Media, a media consultancy. “He’s the hook.”

Other advertising slots were taken by direct-to-consumer brands that either didn’t care about Mr. Carlson’s bad publicity or saw that they could use his intensity to sell their products. Beginning in January 2019, MyPillow, a Fox advertiser whose chief executive, Mike Lindell, is a major promoter of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie, began airing more than $1 million worth of ads on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” each month. Fox appeared to be using MyPillow to cushion Mr. Carlson: As other advertising dried up, the company’s ads spiked. (All told, through December 2021, Mr. Lindell had bought advertising that would have cost $91 million at publicized rates; discounts probably made that sum lower.)

Blue-chip advertisers would never return to the show in force. But thanks in part to the large audiences he could provide for those advertisers who remained, and the premium prices Fox could charge them, Mr. Carlson’s ad revenue began to recover. Every year since 2018, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has brought more annual ad revenue to Fox than any other show, according to estimates by iSpot. Last May, after promoting the white supremacist “replacement” theory, Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018 but brought in almost twice as much money.

As “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became more toxic to advertisers, it also began featuring fewer guests who disagreed with the host, and more guests who simply echoed or amplified Mr. Carlson’s own message. It wasn’t just that liberals didn’t want to debate him, though some now refused to appear on the show, as Mr. Carlson complained during a Fox appearance last summer; Fox was learning that its audience didn’t necessarily like hearing from the other side. “From my discussions with Fox News bookers, my takeaway is that they’ve made the judgment that they just don’t do debate segments anymore,” said Richard Goodstein, a Democratic lobbyist and campaign adviser who appeared regularly on Mr. Carlson’s show until the summer of 2020. Across much of the Fox lineup, former employees said, producers were relying more and more on panels of pro-Trump conservatives competing to see who could denounce Democrats more fervently — a ratings gambit one former Fox employee called “rage inflation.” (One exception, perhaps, is “The Five,” a panel show featuring four conservative co-hosts and one rotating co-host from the left, which has beaten Mr. Carlson in total viewers in some recent months.)

And as advertisers fled, Mr. Carlson’s opening monologue grew. Where once he spoke for only a few minutes, sometimes in a neutral just-asking-questions mode, he now often opened the show with a lengthy stemwinder, addressing his audience as “you” and the objects of his fury as a shadowy “they.” Ratings data showed that the monologues were a hit with viewers, according to one former and one current Fox employee, and by 2020, Mr. Carlson regularly spoke directly to the camera for more than quarter of the hourlong show. Instead of less Tucker, the audience got more.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-fox-news.html

But as televised theater, the formula works. Mr. Carlson reliably draws more than three million viewers. When he defended the idea of demographic “replacement” on a different Fox show in April, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group, called for his firing, noting that the same concept had helped fuel a string of terrorist attacks, including the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. But when Mr. Carlson ran a clip of his comments on his own prime-time show a few days later, according to Nielsen data, the segment got 14 percent more viewers in the advertiser-sweet “demo” of 24- to 54-year-olds than Mr. Carlson’s average for the year.

Every cable network cares about ratings, but none more so than Fox, whose post-Ailes slogan stresses neither fairness nor balance but sheer audience dominance: “Most Watched, Most Trusted.” And at Fox, according to former employees, no host scrutinizes his ratings more closely than Mr. Carlson. He learned how to succeed on television, in part, by failing there.

Unhumble Beginnings

The talk-show host who rails against immigrants and the tech barons of a new Gilded Age is himself the descendant of a German immigrant who became one of the great ranching barons of the old Gilded Age. Henry Miller landed in New York in 1850 and built a successful butcher business in San Francisco; along with a partner, he went on to assemble a land empire spanning three states. They obtained some parcels simply by bribing government officials. Others were wrung from cash-poor Mexican Californians who, following the Mexican-American War, now lived in a newly expanded United States and couldn’t afford to defend their old Mexican land grants in court against speculators like Mr. Carlson’s ancestor. Through the early 20th century, Mr. Miller’s land and cattle empire “was utterly dependent on immigrant labor,” said David Igler, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, and author of a history of the Miller empire.

Over the years, the Miller fortune dispersed, as great fortunes often do, into a fractious array of family branches. Mr. Carlson’s mother, Lisa McNear Lombardi, was born to a third-generation Miller heiress, debuted in San Francisco society and met Richard Carlson, a successful local television journalist, in the 1960s. They eloped to Reno, Nev., in 1967; Tucker McNear Carlson was born two years later, followed by his brother, Buckley. The family moved to the Los Angeles area, where Richard Carlson took a job at the local ABC affiliate, but the Carlsons’ marriage grew rocky and the station fired him a few years later. In early 1976, he moved to San Diego to take a new television job. The boys went with him — according to court records, their parents had agreed it would be temporary — and commuted to Los Angeles on weekends while he and Lisa tried to work out their differences.

But a few months later, just days after the boys returned from a Hawaii vacation with their mother, Richard began divorce proceedings and sought full custody of the children. In court filings, Lisa Carlson claimed he had blindsided her and left her virtually penniless. The couple separated and began fighting over custody and spousal support. Mr. Carlson alleged that his wife had “repeated difficulties with abuse of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines,” and that he had grown concerned about both her mental state and her treatment of the boys. On at least one occasion, he asserted, the boys had walked off the plane in San Diego without shoes; the mother’s own family members, he said, had urged him not to let her see the children unsupervised. He won custody when Tucker was 8, at a hearing Lisa did not attend: According to court records, she had left the country. She eventually settled in France, never to see her sons again. A few years later, Richard Carlson married Patricia Swanson, an heiress to the frozen-food fortune, who adopted both boys.

For many years, Tucker Carlson was tight-lipped about the rupture. In a New Yorker profile in 2017, not long after his show debuted, he described his mother’s departure as a “totally bizarre situation — which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all.” But as controversy and criticism engulfed his show, Mr. Carlson began to describe his early life in darker tones, painting the California of his youth as a countercultural dystopia and his mother as abusive and erratic. In 2019, speaking on a podcast with the right-leaning comedian Adam Carolla, Mr. Carlson said his mother had forced drugs on her children. “She was like, doing real drugs around us when we were little, and getting us to do it, and just like being a nut case,” Mr. Carlson said. By his account, his mother made clear to her two young sons that she had little affection for them. “When you realize your own mother doesn’t like you, when she says that, it’s like, oh gosh,” he told Mr. Carolla, adding that he “felt all kinds of rage about it.”

Mr. Carlson was a heavy drinker until his 30s, something he has attributed in part to his early childhood. But by his own account, his mother’s abandonment also provided him with a kind of pre-emptive defense against the attacks that have rained down on his Fox show. “Criticism from people who hate me doesn’t really mean anything to me,” Mr. Carlson told Megyn Kelly, the former Fox anchor, on her podcast last fall. He went on to say: “I’m not giving those people emotional control over me. I’ve been through that. I lived through that as a child.” One lesson from his youth, Mr. Carlson told one interviewer, was that “you should only care about the opinions of people who care about you.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-gop-republican-party.html

JPMorgan declined to comment. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Simpson Thacher didn’t immediately have comments.

Mr. Musk was undeterred. His bankers began trying to corral tens of billions of dollars in financing for a Twitter deal. His advisers presented prospective lenders with a few pages vaguely outlining Mr. Musk’s goals. The billionaire also talked directly with banks, a person with knowledge of the calls said.

That helped persuade Citigroup, Bank of America, BNP Paribas and other banks to put their money in. Despite a lack of details about Mr. Musk’s plans, lenders were reassured in part by the entrepreneur’s past successes and wealth, the person said.

Mr. Musk also campaigned on Twitter for a deal. He hinted that he would take his proposal directly to shareholders in a so-called tender offer if the company’s board did not accept his bid. On April 16, he tweeted, “Love me tender.” Three days later, he tweeted “____ is the Night,” a reference to the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, “Tender Is the Night.”

Twitter’s board fractured. On April 16, Jack Dorsey, a Twitter founder who stepped down as chief executive in November and is a board member, tweeted that the board had been the “consistent dysfunction of the company.” When asked by a Twitter user whether he was allowed to say that, Mr. Dorsey responded, “no.”

Mr. Dorsey’s criticism rankled other board members and Twitter executives, said two people who worked on the deal. Mr. Taylor asked Mr. Dorsey to stop tweeting negatively, one person said. Mr. Dorsey continued posting references to Twitter’s board.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/technology/twitter-board-elon-musk.html

After a Fox producer, Dan Gallo, expressed concerns to human resources executives about recordings of Mr. Carlson defending statutory rape and calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys,” and on-air comments by Jeanine Pirro questioning a Muslim congresswoman’s loyalty to the Constitution, Mr. Carlson learned about his complaints and confronted him face to face in Los Angeles, demanding that Mr. Gallo “do the honorable thing” and call him if he had a disagreement. Mr. Gallo offered to talk then and there, but Mr. Carlson wasn’t interested. “I’m busy,” the host said, and walked off.

Days after a mass shooting in El Paso by a white man protesting what he called the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Mr. Carlson declared that white supremacy was largely a “hoax.” A young Fox reporter, Cristina Corbin, tweeted, without mentioning Mr. Carlson: “White supremacy is real, as evidenced by fact. Claims that it is a ‘hoax’ do not represent my views.” The host called Ms. Corbin and yelled at her to “shut your mouth,” according to a former Fox executive briefed on the episode. When asked about the incident by Fox management, Mr. Carlson denied making the call.

His playbook sent sponsors fleeing, yet nearly doubled ad dollars

Here is the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” playbook: Go straight for the third rail, be it race, immigration or another hot-button issue; harvest the inevitable backlash; return the next evening to skewer critics for how they responded. Then, do it all again. This feedback loop drove up ratings and boosted loyalty to Fox and Mr. Carlson.

What it did not do was endear Mr. Carlson to advertisers. As blue-chip sponsors fled, Fox filled the space with in-house promos — using Mr. Carlson’s popularity to push other Fox shows — and direct-to-consumer brands like MyPillow, whose chief executive is a major promoter of Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie.

Last May, after promoting the white supremacist “replacement” theory, Mr. Carlson had half as many advertisers as in December 2018. But he brought in almost twice as much money.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/business/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news-takeaways.html

As the hairstylist for Issa Rae, the creator and star of the dramedy “Insecure,” Felicia Leatherwood has seen firsthand how important such choices are to viewers. Rae, playing a romantic lead, wore plenty of natural hairstyles, her Afro-textured looks constant and unabashed — one of the many reasons the series was groundbreaking.

“People were writing me, ‘I just watch the show for the hair,’” Leatherwood recalled. “I said, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know the hair had that impact on people.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, I was waiting to see what her hair was going to do.’ Or, ‘I got my work hairstyles off the show’ and ‘I did my daughter’s hair like that.’ I didn’t even realize the impact of her hair until Twitter showed up.”

Leatherwood said her job as a hairstylist is to provide a sense of confidence and foster ideas of Black beauty using textured hair. “My intention is to make sure that we recognize the queen or the king in us, we recognize the royalty through the hairstyles,” she said, adding that her work was more about “instilling self-esteem in terms of my community and my ancestry.”

This commitment was reflected in the variety of everyday styles she created for Rae, looks that were meant to showcase the versatility of Black women’s hair. On “Insecure,” she said, “I got lucky with being able to just create from my own imagination and without any pushback.” Instead, Rae and the show’s other writers and producers were supportive, with especially positive reactions to the star’s natural looks on set. “This was one of my joys,” Leatherwood said, adding, “Even the men would come and say her hair looks really nice.”

The very act of presenting Black hair can be powerful in itself. “Hair is an expression of who we are and how far we’ve come. It’s our legacy,” said Reinaldo Marcus Green, director of the biopic “King Richard,” about the father of the tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/movies/natural-black-hairstyles-hollywood.html

“We wish he could stay longer, but we are very proud he made CBS his American home and that this partnership will extend one more season on ‘The Late Late Show,’” George Cheeks, the president of CBS, said in a statement.

Mr. Corden’s impending departure is one of the most significant changes for the late-night comedy lineup since 2014 and 2015, when veteran hosts like David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jon Stewart left their shows, and a new generation of stars, including Mr. Corden, Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah and HBO’s John Oliver, went on the air.

There is a feeling of uncertainty in late night beyond Mr. Corden’s departure. Jimmy Kimmel, the longtime ABC host, has a contract that will end soon and has said publicly that he was unsure if he would renew. Stephen Colbert, whose show precedes Mr. Corden’s on CBS, also has a contract that expires next year. Chris Licht, the longtime executive producer of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” left last month to become the chairman of CNN. And Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” recently went through yet another showrunner change, the fourth in four years.

There are questions throughout the entertainment industry over the longtime viability of the late-night talk show genre. Over the last few years, as viewing habits have rapidly changed, ratings for the shows have nose-dived. Five years ago, roughly 2.8 million people were tuning into Mr. Corden’s show as well as NBC’s 12:30 a.m. show, “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” By 2022, that figure had dropped to about 1.9 million, according to Nielsen’s delayed viewing data.

Talk shows — which depend on topical relevance and audiences who make it a daily habit to tune in — have also not fared well on streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/business/media/james-corden-leaving-cbs.html

“John and his generation saw it as their duty to uphold and represent that image of New Hampshire to the nation,” Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, said in an email. Mr. DiStaso treated all candidates alike, he said, whether they were incumbent presidents or business executives with no political experience.

Either way, Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, said in a statement that she entered into the Congressional Record, “he took seriously his role of bringing political news directly to the voters.”

“Politics,” she said, “wasn’t a game to him.”

John Joseph DiStaso was born on Feb. 18, 1954, in Paterson, N.J., where he grew up. His father, Joseph, was a carpet layer. His mother, Helen (Walton) DiStaso, was a bank teller.

He studied English literature at Villanova University, graduating in 1975. He earned a master’s degree in communications at William Paterson College (now University) in Wayne, N.J., in 1979.

While at Villanova, he met Diane Randazza through her brother. Mr. DiStaso and Ms. Randazza married in 1979.

He began his New Hampshire journalism career as the seacoast-area correspondent for the Union Leader. He became a staff reporter in 1980 and stayed until 2014, when the Union Leader hit rocky financial times. He then stunned the political world by becoming the news editor at New Hampshire Journal, a moribund political website owned by Republican operatives, who hired him to bring credibility to their venture. He left a year later for WMUR.

In addition to his wife, Mr. DiStaso is survived by their sons, Dante and Nicholas, and his sister, Doris DiStaso. He lived in New Boston, N.H.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/us/politics/john-distaso-star-reporter-of-new-hampshire-primaries-dies-at-68.html