Richard Carlson, who gained a Peabody Award for his investigative tv stories about an car firm’s brazen fraud — throughout which he additionally outed the corporate’s founder as a transgender girl — and who later ran Voice of America over the last years of the Chilly Struggle, died on March 24 at his house in Boca Grande, Fla. He was 84.
His son Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator and former Fox Information host, mentioned the trigger was pneumonia.
The youthful Mr. Carlson mentioned that his father, who strongly believed within the function of Voice of America, didn’t know earlier than his demise about President Trump’s government order geared toward dismantling the government-funded broadcaster. A federal judge temporarily blocked the plan on Friday.
Voice of America gives information programming in 49 languages to dozens of nations the place residents have restricted entry to impartial journalism, together with China and Iran.
In 1988, it was new alternatives to succeed in folks within the Soviet Union due to efforts by the Soviet chief, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to open up society.
“Our most essential job is supplying what Maestro Rostropovich as soon as described as ‘each day bread for folks,’ and that’s what we’re doing, intellectually feeding hungry folks,” Mr. Carlson told The New York Times in 1988. He was referring to the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who championed inventive freedom within the Soviet Union.
Mr. Carlson, who was often known as Dick, turned smitten with journalism years earlier than he entered authorities service. Beginning within the early Nineteen Sixties, he was a duplicate boy at The Los Angeles Occasions, a reporter for United Press Worldwide, a contract reporter, and a TV journalist.
He collaborated with one other journalist, Lance Brisson, on an exposé for Look journal in 1969 that accused Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco of getting ties to Mafia figures. Mr. Alioto sued Look’s proprietor, Cowles Communications, for libel. In 1977 — six years after Look had folded and following 4 trials in federal courtroom — a choose awarded Mr. Alioto $350,000 in damages. Mr. Carlson and Mr. Brisson weren’t defendants.
In 1975, when he was at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, Mr. Carlson and a producer, Pete Noyes, gained a Peabody for uncovering fraudulent claims by G. Elizabeth Carmichael, who ran the Twentieth Century Motor Automotive Firm. Even whereas she was a fugitive from a counterfeiting arrest years earlier than, she constructed the corporate across the Dale, a three-wheeled automobile that she mentioned might get 70 miles to the gallon. However she by no means produced something greater than a prototype.
Certainly one of Mr. Carlson’s revelations — along with the weather of the fraud for which she was convicted and imprisoned — was that Ms. Carmichael was transgender.
Throughout an interview for “The Lady and the Dale” (2021), a four-part HBO documentary, Mr. Carlson admitted that he purposely used male pronouns to seek advice from her when he testified throughout her trial in 1976.
Zackary Drucker, one of many documentary’s administrators, who herself is transgender, told IndieWire in 2021 mentioned that she had cried whereas interviewing Mr. Carlson.
“I used to be having a day already,” she mentioned, “and the topic simply went on a transphobic tear, not even about Liz however about trans folks.”
In 1976, when Mr. Carlson was working as an anchorman for KFMB-TV in San Diego, he found that the tennis participant Renee Richards had been born male. She initially denied to him that she had had transition surgical procedure. However after conceding to him that it was true, she pleaded that he not report the story.
“I couldn’t make a dent,” she wrote in her memoir “No Approach Renee: The Second Half of My Infamous Life” (2007, with John Ames). “He felt that I had misplaced my proper to privateness once I appeared as a contestant in a public tennis event.”
Richard Carlson left journalism a yr after his report on Ms. Richards; he instructed San Diego journal in 1984 that he thought of tv information “insipid, sophomoric and superficial.”
Richard Warner Carlson was born Richard Anderson on Feb. 10, 1941, in Boston. He was born with rickets and bent legs as a result of his organic mom, Dorothy Anderson, an single teenager, “starved herself to maintain her being pregnant a secret, he wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post in 1993.
He was just a few months previous when his mom left him at an orphanage. He discovered a cheerful momentary house in Malden, Mass., with foster dad and mom, and was adopted about two years later by Warner Carlson, a tannery supervisor, and his spouse, Ruth, a nurse.
Richard was 12 when his adoptive father died; he was later jailed for stealing a automobile and expelled from highschool. Quickly after that, he enlisted within the Navy and requested to be assigned to the Marines. He was skilled as a medic.
Throughout his time in journalism, Tucker Carlson mentioned in an interview, his father reported commonly concerning the Black Panthers and the Mafia and befriended Eddie Cannizzaro, who claimed to have killed Benjamin Siegel, the mobster often known as Bugsy, who helped develop Las Vegas as a haven for casinos.
“Cannizzaro was an enormous animal-rescue man, and so was my father,” Tucker Carlson mentioned. His father, as soon as the president of a shelter, Actors and Others for Animals, gained an Emmy Award for a information particular on KABC in 1972 about inhumane shelter circumstances for canine in Los Angeles.
After a number of years because the vp of a financial institution in San Diego, Mr. Carlson ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Diego in 1984. He started working in Washington in 1985 to be the spokesman for the US Data Company and have become the performing director of Voice of America a yr later, underneath President Ronald Reagan. He was later confirmed by the Senate and served till 1991.
“I take into account myself enormously lucky to have been on the Voice throughout in all probability its most fascinating time, if not one among its most fascinating instances,” he said on “The Paul Leslie Hour,” a podcast, in 2024, “and to have watched the modifications that happened from the time I arrived, as a result of our focus was on the Soviet Union in some ways.”
After leaving Voice of America, Mr. Carlson held a number of jobs within the Nineties, together with ambassador to the Seychelles, the island nation within the Indian Ocean; chief government of the nonprofit Company for Public Broadcasting; and president of a division of King World Productions that syndicated “The Oprah Winfrey Present” and different applications. Within the 2000s, he was vice chairman of the Basis for Protection of Democracies, an antiterrorism suppose tank.
Along with his son Tucker, Mr. Carlson is survived by one other son, Buckley, and 5 grandchildren. His marriage to Patricia Swanson, a member of the household that based the Swanson frozen meals empire, ended together with her demise in 2023. His earlier marriage to Lisa McNear, the mom of his sons, resulted in divorce. Mr. Carlson raised their sons.
In 1990, Mr. Carlson promoted a plan by the American authorities to construct a $400 million shortwave relay station within the Negev desert in Israel to extend the energy of the Voice of America’s alerts to Japanese Europe and the Soviet Union.
“Not way back our broadcasts had been jammed by the Soviet Union,” he said at a information convention in Tel Aviv. “Not way back we had been in a tense disagreement and concepts. Now it’s a market of phrases and concepts, and this relay station is essential to that market.”
Three years later, the Clinton administration scuttled the transmitter.
