Fox News host Tucker Carlson for the first time Monday addressed the abrupt resignation of his show’s top writer who was exposed last week for regularly making disparaging and racist statements about women and minorities in online message boards.
Carlson did not apologize nor acknowledge the posts as racist.
“We are all human,” he said Monday. “When we pretend we are holy, we are lying.”
The show's former writer, Blake Neff, used a pseudonym for about five years to post the bigoted statements in an unmoderated forum called AutoAdmit, which is popular with law students and known for racism, misogyny and hate speech, CNN learned.
Neff made some of the anonymous statements as recently as this month.
Tucker Carlson responds
While the network condemned Neff’s words over the weekend, Carlson defiantly directed most of his ire toward the man’s critics during a fiery monologue on Monday night’s show.
“What Blake wrote anonymously was wrong. We don’t endorse those words. They have no connection to the show,” he said before blasting news reports about his former staffer, calling Neff’s critics “ghouls” who were “beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man.”
“Self-righteousness also has its costs,” Carlson said. “We are all human. When we pretend we are holy, we are lying. When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we’re are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it. There’s no question.”
Fox executives issue rebuke
After Neff’s comments came to light, Fox News executives sent a memo to employees the next day, condemning Neff’s words as “horrendous and deeply offensive,” according to The New York Times.
They also said Carlson would address the matter on Monday’s show.
“We want to make abundantly clear that FOX News Media strongly condemns this horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior,” the memo from Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and President and Executive Editor Jay Wallace said.
“Neff’s abhorrent conduct on this forum was never divulged on the show or the network until Friday, at which point we swiftly accepted his resignation. Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force.”
At the end of Monday’s show, Carlson said he would take a “long-planned” vacation to go “trout fishing” for the rest of the week.
“Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade will serve as guest host while Carlson is away, according to reports.
A popular show
“Tucker Carlson Tonight” is hugely popular with the conservative audience, touting an average of more than 4.3 million nightly viewers. Carlson is among the Fox News hosts who is regularly watched by President Donald Trump. The show finished the second quarter of the year as the most-watched program in cable news history, according to a report by The Hill.
Neff was the chief among a small group of writers of Carlson’s nightly monologues.
He joined “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in January 2017, arriving there from the conservative website The Daily Caller, which Carlson founded.
In the past, Carlson has praised Neff as a “wonderful writer” and also gave him a credit in the acknowledgments of one of his books, according to CNN.
Show matched rhetoric
Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog group that has long pressured advertisers to pull their commercials from Fox News programming, said Neff’s comments were not far from the rhetoric that showed up on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
“His day job was writing a somewhat more sophisticated version of his online posts for Carlson’s show,” Media Matters senior fellow Matt Gertz wrote Monday.
“His employment provides a clue as to how some particular obsessions of that community ended up on Fox prime time. But ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ is drenched in the talking points of white nationalists because that’s the way Carlson wants it.”
Carlson has been known to dismiss white supremacy as a hoax and conspiracy theory on the show. He said Monday that Neff was also “horrified” and “ashamed” by his own comments, and added that he “has paid a very heavy price.”
Other hot water
Last month, several major advertisers, including Walt Disney Co., T-Mobile and Papa John’s, cut ties with Carlson’s show after he made inflammatory comments about George Floyd protesters.
Carlson said the Black Lives Matters movement “may be a lot of things, this moment we’re living through, but it is definitely not about Black lives. Remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will.”
Fox News issued a clarification, saying “they” referred to Democratic politicians and not Black people.
Carlson also sparked controversy last week when he accused Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Asian American, of being among the people who “hate America.” Duckworth, a potential vice presidential choice for Joe Biden, is an Iraq War veteran whose legs were amputated after a helicopter crash.
About the Author
