Tucker Carlson on raising eyebrows, raising children

Tucker Carlson, editor in chief of The Daily Caller and a Fox News commentator, has been a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and anchor and host on CNN and MSNBC. We have an interview with him in the current issue of WORLD and ran some of his other comments yesterday. Here are a few additional ones.

What’s essential to succeed as a television commentator? The ability to sum things up crisply. Thinking through the three points you would like to make and how to distill them into a form listeners can understand. People don’t listen closely to television, and they don’t have a sense of irony or nuance or sarcasm.

Is The Daily Caller television in tabloid form? I like the tabloids. I read the New York Post every morning. It isn’t the highest-tone publication in America, but I have four children who range in age from 10 to 18, and a wife, and two dogs, and all of them except the dogs read the New York Post every morning.

What do the dogs read? They just stare at the refrigerator.

What do you want for your four children? To become decent, squared-away people with good marriages. That’s what I really want. I hate to say this because it seems so treacly and Oprah-ish, but I mean it with total sincerity. I want them to be decent people. I want them to have happy marriages. That’s the most important thing.

Who are their heroes? I don’t know. I think their grandfathers. I hope nobody in pop culture. We do our best to shield our kids from that garbage.

Who are your heroes? My heroes are all writers. I’ve always loved George Orwell. I love the almost shocking, windowpane clarity of his writing. People who write in an opaque way, which is pretty much everyone in academia, either have no idea what they are talking about, and they’re trying to hide that from your readers, or they’re lying. They’re hiding rather than exposing—and writing ought to be the process of exposing to light things you think are true.

What are you doing as a parent to try and push them in that direction—in a subtle way, of course? Living out a happy marriage in front of them would be number one. If you have a marriage that is a source of strength and happiness in your life, and they’re growing up around that, that’s a powerful way to communicate a truth.

Why are you against abortion? Because it’s killing a child. And I’m not a very evolved person, morally, but I’m not for killing kids. It’s my baseline. Are drone attacks OK? I’m wishy-washy. Is it OK to kill your kid? No. Not OK! For a church to be in favor of killing children just blows my … and it get’s no attention.

What else is clear to you? Divorce. As a child of divorce I can say that hurts kids. For real. I know. I’ve seen it and lived it. I’m not defending the gay rights movement, which I think is pretty awful by and large, but I am saying that a disproportionate amount of energy goes to the gay marriage thing—when I know a ton of Christians who have gotten divorced and screwed up their kids.