Brian Stelter: ‘I was a big fan of Tucker Carlson’

Brian Stelter is offering some past-tense praise of Tucker Carlson, a media figure whom he says he has watched change over his decades-long career in the media.

“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I was a big fan of Tucker Carlson in his ‘Crossfire’ days,” Stelter, a leading media reporter, said on Steve Krakauer’s “Fourth Watch” podcast this week. “He had this unpredictable libertarian streak; he was not your average conservative commentator on cable news.”

Stelter this week published a book titled “Network of Lies” focusing on Fox News and conservative media coverage of the 2020 election and former President Trump’s false claims about voter fraud.

Carlson worked as a top host at Fox News for six years before the network pulled him off the air just days after agreeing to pay Dominion Voting Systems hundreds of millions to settle claims of defamation stemming from its coverage of the 2020 election.

Stelter, who has covered Carlson as a fixture across cable news for years, called the host “very charming back in his CNN and MSNBC days,” and said his ouster at Fox “really resonated with me, as someone who was canceled at CNN in 2022.”

The former host of CNN’s long-running media affairs program “Reliable Sources,” Stelter was fired by CNN soon after it hired former network president Chris Licht, who was ousted himself a year later.

Krakauer is an opinion contributor for The Hill and is also a contributor at NewsNation, a cable news channel that is owned by The Hill parent company Nexstar Media Group.