'What the hell happened to that guy?' Plug pulled on book about disgraced Fox News host
Based on changing tastes, relevancy, and a glut of books on Donald Trump's four years in office, a major publisher has pulled the plug on a long-planned book about a Fox News host who was at the center of the maelstrom.
According to a report from Politico's Michael Schaffer, New York Times Magazine writer Jason Zengerle is going to have to find another publisher for his book, "Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind," after Little, Brown and Co. decided to not go through with publication of the book, which was due to be released in February of next year.
According to the Schaffer, the book, which once seemed important due to the Fox News pundit's outsized popularity during and right after Donald Trump's presidency, now no longer seems relevant as Carlson's fame has waned after being fired for pushing unfounded conspiracy theories as well as his personal conduct, including texts that had the media giant's management reeling.
As Schaffer put it, the book cancellation is both good news for Carlson, because it's critical of the former Fox pundit, and bad news because it shows he is yesterday's news since being relegated to streaming his views to a smaller and diminishing audience.
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As Schaffer wrote, "It’s a far cry from the situation in 2021, when Carlson was zooming past Sean Hannity to become cable’s top talker, with a legion of fans on the right and an army of detractors in the center and on the left — and even speculation about a possible presidential bid. That’s when Little, Brown and Co. tapped Zengerle, a New York Times Magazine contributor and one of the leading magazine writers on contemporary politics, to do a book on the political-media titan," adding that times have changed and there is little appetite for a Carlson book now.
"Plenty of projects that face these issues don’t get shelved. The travails of the Carlson book also say something about the publishing and intellectual climate in Washington and in the political world more generally," he wrote before writing, "a thoughtful look at how the bow-tied CNN preppy became the immigrant-baiting Putin admirer also gets at the biggest question in American politics: What the hell happened to that guy?
"I got a peek at a 60,000-word chunk of draft from Zengerle’s reporting, and it presents a nuanced portrait of a generation of conservatives who grew up in the Reagan era, came to Washington in the 1990s, and were pulled in wildly different directions as the Bush administration floundered and the new GOP embraced Trump. That’s fascinating stuff — if not exactly the kind of scathing hate-read whose scandalous allegations will send books flying off shelves in blue-city bookstores," he wrote before suggesting, "Untethered from larger institutions, a bomb-thrower attracts less attention, even if plenty of people are still influenced by his opinions."
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