The recklessness of Tucker Carlson
On his highly rated prime-time program, Fox News host Tucker Carlson commonly faults others for not properly loving America — for not sufficiently adoring its freedoms, opportunities and promise. He even goes as far as to say that Democrats “hate” the place.
Among the reasons Carlson should indeed appreciate this country: His brand of tendentious broadcasting enjoys generous protection under the First Amendment. A case now making its way through federal courts, though, may test that proposition.
In a complaint filed in December, former Playboy model Karen McDougal sued Fox News over a “Tucker Carlson Tonight” segment in which the host accused her of “extortion” in her dealings with Donald Trump. “Two women approach Donald Trump and threaten to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money,” argued Carlson in a December 2018 segment. “Now that sounds like a classic case of extortion. Yet for whatever reason, Trump caves to it, and he directs Michael Cohen to pay the ransom. Now, more than two years later, Trump is a felon for doing this. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
One of the reasons that the sequence outlined by Carlson doesn’t make any sense is that it’s false. Those “two women” are Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) and McDougal, both of whom received hush money for keeping quiet about alleged affairs with Trump. In McDougal’s case, she didn’t “approach Donald Trump”; through an attorney, she approached American Media Inc., whose holdings included the National Enquirer; AMI paid McDougal $150,000 for the rights to the story as well as columns on fitness. Then the company essentially buried the story. Trump and his then-attorney, Michael Cohen, were coordinating the whole “catch and kill” operation with AMI executive David Pecker.
In her lawsuit, McDougal alleged that Carlson’s representations were “intentionally false and made with reckless disregard for the truth.” Those words are deliberate: Under First Amendment law, there’s a high bar for defaming a public figure such as McDougal. The “actual malice” standard requires proof that the offending, false statement was made knowingly or with “reckless disregard" for the truth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/26/recklessness-tucker-carlson/
