A revelatory, jaw-dropping portrait of Tucker Carlson’s career and his history of reinvention, and a story of how the right-wing media lost its mind.

New York Times Magazine writer Jason Zengerle’s eye-opening narrative follows Tucker Carlson’s infamous journey from gifted young reporter at The Weekly Standard to a noxious talking head on Fox News, and then to his dethroning and defenestration.

In the tradition of Our Man and The Loudest Voice in the Room, Zengerle examines how Tucker Carlson’s Zelig-like career offers a unique lens into the confusing, myopic, and utterly shameless evolution of American conservatism, its media presence and punditry, from the 1990s to the present.

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‘The only time I met Tucker Carlson, in 2010, he told me: “You need to promote yourself more.” Carlson’s lust for fame, money, and power led him into a cesspool of bigotry and lies. Because this story is also the tale of how a new elite is destroying all that’s valuable about America, Jason Zengerle’s gripping account is both a journalistic triumph and a public service.’

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‘Mordant, insightful, vigorously reported and, yes, deliciously entertaining … Hated by All the Right People is as much a work of media criticism as it is a professional biography of Carlson, and Zengerle chronicles how first television, then the internet started to reward extremes, privileging provocation and punditry over sombre fact-finding.’

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‘If you’re looking for an answer to the question “How did we get here?” — from 1990s multiculturalism and free market globalism to ICE raids and Venezuela — you could do worse than using the arc of Tucker Carlson’s career as your lens. And if you’re looking for insight into the right-wing pundit’s transformations, you’ll definitely want to read Jason Zengerle’s breezy, entertaining and ultimately disquieting Hated by All the Right People, a biography of Carlson that tracks his turn from bow-tied beau ideal of the Washington establishment into the MAGA conspiracy theorist in chief.’

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‘What emerges from [Zengerle’s] portrait is a kind of morality tale about the decline of political journalism and the rise of for-profit agitprop … A richly detailed portrait of Tucker Carlson and the media trends that have shaped political commentary.’

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‘Smart, well-written, and well-reported … the first [book] to reckon critically with probably the most interesting, important, compelling and arguably dangerous media personality of the Trump age … Zengerle dissects Carlson’s media career with a shrewd scalpel.’

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‘The aptly named Hated by all the Right People is neither a hit piece nor a hagiography; it is a chronology of Carlson’s ascent and descent, drawing on interviews with those who knew or worked with him. It charts the transformation of a talented young writer into what Zengerle describes as a “noxious talking head”.’

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‘In many respects, the strength of Zengerle’s effort … is its restraint. In chronicling the rise of Carlson as a radical but influential voice, whose persuasive power comes in part from his mastery of demagogic oversimplification, Zengerle lets his reporting speak for itself, resisting the temptation to offer his readers easy answers where reality is complicated.’