Richard Carlson won the Peabody Award for his investigation television report on the brave fraud of the car company. Meanwhile, he also kicked out the company's founder as a transgender woman.
His son Tucker Carlson, a conservative commentator and former Fox News host, said the cause was pneumonia.
Young Carlson said his father, who was a strong believer in the role of the American voice, had no idea about President Trump's executive order, which aimed to dismantle government-funded broadcasters before he died. A federal judge temporarily blocked the plan on Friday.
Voice of America offers news programming in 49 languages to dozens of countries with limited access to independent journalism, including China and Iran.
In 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev was looking at a new opportunity to reach the people of the Soviet Union as he strived to open society.
“Our most important job is to provide what Maestro Rostropovich once described as “daily bread for people.” That's what we're doing, feeding people who are intellectually hungry,” Carlson told the New York Times in 1988.
Known as Dick, Carlson became obsessed with journalism a few years before he entered government service. Since the early 1960s, he was a copyboy for the Los Angeles Times, a reporter for United Press International, a freelance reporter, and a television journalist.
He worked with another journalist Lance Brison in 1969, when San Francisco Mayor Joseph Arioto accused of having a relationship with a mafia figure. Arioto sued Look's owner Cowles Communications for Libel. 1977 – Six years after the appearance collapsed, following four trials in federal court, the judge awarded Mr. Arioto $350,000 in damages. Carlson and Brisson were not defendants.
In 1975, while on KABC-TV in Los Angeles, Carlson and producer Pete Noyes acquired Peabody for revealing fraudulent claims by G. Elizabeth Carmichael, who ran a 20th century car company. Even while she was a fugitive from a fake arrest several years ago, she built a company around Dale. However, she never produced anything more than a prototype.
One of Carlson's revelations was that Carmichael was transgender, in addition to the elements of the fraud she was convicted and imprisoned.
In an interview with The Lady and the Dale (2021), a four-part HBO documentary, Carlson admitted that he intentionally used male pronouns when he testified at his 1976 trial.
Zackary Drucker, one of the documentary's directors, told Indiewire in 2021 that he was transgender.
“I was already spending the day,” she said.
In 1976, while Carlson was working as an anchorman for KFMB-TV in San Diego, he discovered that tennis player Rennie Richards was born as a man. She initially denied him that she had undergone transition surgery. However, after admitting it to him that it was true, she pleaded that he would not report the story.
“I couldn't make a dent,” she wrote in her memoir, “Lenny is not: The Later in My Infamous Life” (2007, with John Ames). “When he appeared as a contestant in a public tennis tournament, I felt I had lost my right to privacy.”
Richard Carlson left journalism a year after his report on Richards. He told San Diego magazine in 1984 that he considers television news to be “Insipid, Sophomoric and Sufficial.”
Richard Warner Carlson was born in Boston on February 10, 1941 to Richard Anderson. His biological mother, unmarried teenager Dorothy Anderson, said, “I starved to keep my pregnancy a secret, so he was born with rickets and bent legs.
He was a few months when his mother left him at the orphanage. He found a happy temporary home in Malden, Massachusetts with his foster parents, and was adopted about two years later by his tanning manager, Warner Carlson, and his wife, nurse Ruth.
Richard was 12 years old when his adoptive father passed away. He was later jailed and expelled from high school for stealing a car. Shortly afterwards, he enlisted in the Navy and asked to be assigned to the Marines. He was trained as a Medic.
In Journalism, Tucker Carlson said in an interview that his father regularly reported on the Black Panthers and the Mafia, and became friends with Eddie Canisaro.
“Canizaro was a big animal man, and so was my father,” Tucker Carlson said. His father, formerly the president of shelter, actor and other animals, won an Emmy Award in 1972 for the inhumane shelter conditions for dogs in Los Angeles.
A few years later as Vice President of the San Diego Bank, Carlson became mayor of San Diego in 1984. He became a spokesman for the US Intelligence Agency in Washington in 1985 and a year later became the acting director of the United States under President Ronald Reagan. He was later confirmed by the Senate and served until 1991.
“I think I'm very fortunate to have spoken out at perhaps the most interesting, if not the most interesting,” he said in his 2024 podcast, Paul Leslie Hour, “and because we've seen the changes that have happened since we arrived, so our focus has been in the Soviet Union in many ways.”
After leaving Voice of America, Carlson acquired several jobs in the 1990s, including an ambassador for Seychelles, an island nation of the Indian Ocean. Chief executive of a nonprofit organization for public broadcasting. Part of King World Productions, which syndicated the Oprah Winfrey Show and other programs. In the 2000s he was vice-president of the Democracy Foundation, an anti-terrorism think tank.
In addition to his son Tucker, Mr. Carlson is survived by another son, Buckley and five grandchildren. Her marriage to Patricia Swanson, a member of the family that founded Swanson Frozen Food Empire, ended with her death in 2023. Carlson raised his sons.
In 1990, Carlson promoted a plan by the US government to build a $400 million shortwave relay station in Israel's Negev desert, increasing the strength of its American signals and voices towards the Soviet Union.
“Until a while ago, our broadcast was being hampered by the Soviet Union,” he told a news conference in Tel Aviv. “Until a while ago, we were in a tense war of words and ideas. Now it's a market for words and ideas, and this relay station is very important to that market.”
Three years later, the Clinton administration gave up the transmitter.
