Tucker Carlson: A Qualitative Analysis of Rhetoric Employed by Tucker Carlson and the GOP

Abstract

Cable news has been an essential method for Americans to stay up to date with political news for decades. Moreover, politicians have always leveraged news media to advance their political interests. Since 2016, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has skyrocketed into the conservative news host he is known as today. His late-night show Tucker Carlson Tonight is one of the most watched cable news shows, bringing in millions of viewers. This thesis seeks to explore the extent of Carlson’s influence on Republican politicians. Specifically, does Tucker Carlson’s use of inflammatory moral rhetoric on hot button issues motivate Republican politicians to adopt the same talking points? I focus on immigration and LGBT issues from 2020-2022 considering they are both controversial and prominent issues for the GOP. I hypothesize that Republicans will use similar language and arguments as Tucker Carlson in congressional hearings because they 1) want favorable exposure on Fox News and 2) they want to absorb Carlson’s audience into their own base of constituents. To explore this, I analyzed transcripts from Tucker Carlson Tonight and congressional records filtering for Republicans, immigration and LGBT issues, and the three- year time range. I created a Carlson and Congress corpus to run through Antconc, a corpus analysis toolkit for concordance and text analysis. First, I found the strongest collocates Carlson uses in relation to immigration and LGBT topics. Then, I expounded on these collocates by identifying how these collocates were used in his arguments. To assess whether arguments used moral language, I referred to the Moral Foundations Theory. I repeated the same steps for Republicans and provided a qualitative analysis of their arguments in comparison to Carlson. Finally, I used a public online corpus of contemporary American English, COCA, to compare Carlson’s and Republicans’ arguments with how immigration and LGBT topics are typically talked about in American English. I found that Carlson and Republicans present similar, negative arguments about immigration. They rely heavily on vice language from the ingroup and authority foundation, arguing that most immigrants are coming into the country illegally and bringing with them drugs and crime. Carlson also argues that illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs and coming to America to have “anchor babies” in an effort to avoid deportation. In comparison, COCA only associates negative moral language with Black and brown immigrants, whereas neutral language is afforded to European immigrants. On the other hand, Carlson and Republicans arguments about LGBT did not align as close. Carlson relies on vice fairness and purity language, arguing discrimination against heterosexual Americans is a byproduct of activism supporting gay marriage. Additionally, Carlson argues the transgender community is a threat to children, especially girls because heterosexual women using the women’s bathroom will likely lead to sexual assault and heterosexual women playing on women’s teams gives them an unfair advantage against biological women. In contrast, Congress focuses most on vice fairness language and addresses discrimination against the LGBT community. Congress is moreso aligned with COCA, which associates LGBT topics with narratives of sexual identity and exploration. Unfortunately, a policy recommendation addressing politicians adopting the same talking points as a news host is not feasible. However, a consequence of this is the propagation of mis/disinformation. I recommend a two-step approach. First, ensure news hosts provide reputable sources for their claims and provide viewers with a resource to report unfounded claims. Second, fact-check politicians and provide results on a public domain. In tandem, these efforts work to limit mis/disinformation spread using incendiary moral rhetoric.