Before Ben Smith interviewed Tucker Carlson, the Semafor co-founder jokingly pleaded with the Fox News host not to “steamroll” him. Spoiler alert: He did.
The Semafor pre-launch event on Thursday morning was chock full of journalism A-listers, including Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Wesley Lowery, and Politico co-founder John Harris.
But none of the chats were nearly as contentious or headline-grabbing as Smith’s heated exchange with Carlson, who joined remotely from what appeared to be the inside of a closet.
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The tone of their interview was set almost immediately when Carlson began by swiping at Lorenz, a frequent target of his on-air attacks, remarking that he was “heartened” to hear someone ask Lorenz hard questions.
“You’ll let me ask questions and not steamroll me because you’re a professional,” Smith responded before the steamrolling—as critics of the interview repeatedly identified it—began.
The Semafor co-founder launched into a question on whether Carlson believes white people are superior to other races. “No, of course not,” the Fox News host responded with a chuckle.
“I think there are a lot of criticisms you can level at me. I think sometimes I overstate the case, I get pissed, I get nasty,” Carlson fired back. “One-hundred percent of the people I’m mad at are well-educated white liberals.” He let out one of his signature cackles after declaring “I hate you” to an imagined “38-year old female white lawyer with a barren personal life.” He added, mid-laugh, “I’m not mad at black people!”
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Smith later showed a very brief clip of a Tucker Carlson Tonight segment pushing the “Great Replacement” theory that the liberal elite are deliberately “replacing” white Americans through mass immigration. (Carlson has frequently espoused variations of this far-right claim, all while claiming he has never done so.)
Carlson ran through a series of deflective defenses, including blaming Democrats for the Great Replacement theory, while Smith meekly interjected on a few occasions—resulting in the Fox host condescendingly or mockingly batting him away.
“I found that clip disturbing,” Smith said. “The language of replacement theory, which you popularized—the language of replacement theory is, like, specifically the language used by neo-Nazis to recruit people to their cause.”
The Semafor boss asked if the Fox host feels any “compunction” for using that language. In return, Carlson referred to Smith as “correctly, a propagandist and not a journalist” and talked over him for a minute and mocked his questions.
Elsewhere in the chat, Carlson dodged on whether he would run for higher office (“I have zero ambition. Not just politically, but in life.”) and made a thinly veiled transphobic remark (“Only women can get pregnant! I dare you to say that”), claimed he does not pay attention to his Nielsen ratings, and suggested he is merely a good-faith arbiter of truth.
“I really try my hardest to tell the truth, I mean it. You’re not going to catch me lying, you’ll definitely catch me making mistakes,” Carlson said, later adding: “I do tend to, you know, overstate and my wife is always reminding me and I regret that. But I don’t lie, but I feel like a lot of people lie.”
The interview finished with Carlson’s claim that, to solve these divisions, the media had to “deracialize” conversations. He said people are instead divided on topics of “actual interest,” not the racial dynamics that he claimed the Democratic Party framed it as (though he threw in a jab at the Republican Party, which he said he despised).
When time ran out on their conversation, Smith ended the interview by abruptly thanking the Fox News star for appearing. “That was fun!” Carlson exclaimed through laughter while a straight-faced Smith looked away.
The 20-minute chat was met with some negative reviews from fellow journalists, including Lowery, who appeared earlier in the event.
“The tucker interview is actually a good example of one of the points that i made - how much, if any, of the mainstream media’s trust should be about appeasing people like this (tucker, people who share his clearly not-fact based, racist beliefs)?” the former WaPo reporter tweeted. “I would say none.”
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