Tucker Carlson is furious that Fox News isn't taking seriously his claim that the NSA is spying on him, report says
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
- Tucker Carlson is angry that Fox News won't support his claim he's being surveilled, per CNN.
- Carlson has claimed the NSA is spying on him and plotting to take him off air.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is furious that other parts of the company are not supporting his claim that the NSA is spying on him, CNN reported.
Carlson has alleged that the listening agency has targeted him in a plot to take his show off-air. The NSA has denied ever targeting Carlson or having any designs on his TV show.
Nonetheless, Carlson has stuck to has claim, citing an unnamed tipster he says told him that NSA agents plan to leak hacked messages to discredit him.
Though Carlson - an opinion host - has made the claim a core part of his output, Fox staff on the news side have steered clear.
This has led critics to question whether the Carlson's evidence is as compelling as he claims. The situation left Carlson "furious" at network executives and its public relations team "for not backing him up," an unnamed source told CNN.
"Tensions are sky high," the person said.
Carlson in a message to CNN pushed back against the report, and insulted a reporter at the network. Its not clear which of the report's two authors - Brian Stelter or Oliver Darcy - the insult was aimed at.
"I'm not mad at anyone at Fox," he said. "If I was, I'd say so. I'm mad at you for lying relentlessly. What a loathsome person you are. Please print that."
Many critics have been dismissive about Carlson's allegations about the NSA.
According to reports, Carlson had been seeking to broker an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin through intermediaries around the same time he made the spying claim.
A Fox News spokesperson in a statement to Axios in June regarding Carlson's claims about the NSA said: "We support any of our hosts pursuing interviews and stories free of government interference."
It raises the possibility that his data may have been swept up as part of NSA surveillance.
The NSA's statement denied targeting Carlson. "Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air," the agency said.
Carlson on his show has long sought to portray US intelligence agencies as plotting to suppress and disenfranchise ordinary conservatives.
In June, he pushed the conspiracy theory that the FBI instigated the Capitol riot as part of a plot to discredit Trump supporters.