Tucker by Moore Chadwick

Author:Moore, Chadwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: All Seasons Press
Published: 2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

If O.J. Simpson hadn’t murdered his wife, I probably wouldn’t be working in television,” wrote Carlson in his 2003 memoir Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, published when he was thirty-four. “After years of writing political stories for newspapers and magazines, I thought I knew all about hostile responses from the public. Then I went into television. For pure red-in-the-face, neck-bulging, I-know-where-you-live-buddy reactions, nothing beats TV. It brings out the crazy in people.”

As he tells it, one day in the fall of 1995 he happened to come back from lunch early, take-out hot dog in hand, and a receptionist at The Weekly Standard, where he worked at the time, asked what he knew about the O.J. trial. Dan Rather’s booker had called looking for someone to appear on CBS’s 48 Hours to discuss the case. Carlson admits he knew relatively little about the case, but anyone who might know more was still at lunch. So by the end of the day he was on his way to New York for his first television appearance.

As he observes, people spend years training to be doctors or lawyers, but he became a TV talking head in about twelve hours.

“The whole experience had raised troubling questions about the way the world works: What did I know about the Simpson case that the rest of the population didn’t? Was I really the most qualified person to explain the effect of the trial on American society? If not, why was I pretending to be? And why was a major news network allowing me to do it?” he asked. “I realized later that I had been applying print standards to television. But print isn’t television. Both are forms of journalism, just as jogging and roller skating are both forms of forward motion. They’re not the same. They require different skills. They operate by different rules.”

Though he never again discussed the Simpson case on television, Carlson was now in the talking head club. “It wasn’t that my one appearance had been a smashing success. The important thing was that it had happened. The world of talk show guests is like a closed union: You can’t join unless you’re already a member. Bookers resist booking people they’ve never seen on television. Conversely, once you’ve been booked, you’re bookable. The process is self-authenticating.”

Still, his television career was nearly derailed before it got seriously started by a mentally ill stalker. The deranged fan — an Indiana woman named Kimberly Carter, who wrote him letters referring to herself as his biggest fan and sent him a keychain and ballpoint pen as gifts — claimed she overheard a friend say Carlson would be at a pizza joint in Louisville, Kentucky, and, by her account, he either slipped narcotics into her drink or knocked her unconscious at the restaurant and violently raped her, presumably in front of dozens of patrons and staff. Carlson had never been to Louisville, let alone heard of the restaurant, and was most likely live on-air in a Washington, D.

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