Richard Carlson, Journalist Who Led Voice of America, Dies at 84

Richard Carlson, who won a Peabody Award for his investigative television reports on the brazen fraud of an automotive company – during which he also passed the founder of the company as a transgender woman – and who later managed Voice of America during the last years of the Cold War, died on March 24 at his home in Boca Grande, Fla. It was 84.

His son Tucker Carlson, conservative commentator and former Fox News conductor, said that the cause was pneumonia.

The youngest Carlson said that his father, who firmly believed in the role of Voice of America, did not know before his death on the executive order of President Trump aimed at dismantling the issuer financed by the government. A federal judge temporarily blocked the plan on Friday.

Voice of America provides a programming of news in 49 languages ​​to dozens of countries where citizens have limited access to independent journalism, including China and Iran.

In 1988, he was looking for new opportunities to reach people in the Soviet Union due to the efforts of the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to open society.

“Our most important work is to provide what Maestro Rostropovich once described as” daily bread for people “and is what we are doing, intellectually nourishing the hungry people”, Carlson told the New York Times in 1988. He was referring to the cellor and director Mstislav Rostropovich, who supported artistic freedom in the Soviet Union.

Carlson, who was known as Dick, became affected by journalism years before entering the government service. Starting from the early 1960s, it was a copy at the Los Angeles Times, journalist for United Press International, a freelance journalist and television journalist.

He collaborated with another journalist, Lance Brison, in an Expose for Look magazine in 1969 who accused Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco of having links with the mafia figures. Mr. Alioto sued the owner of Look, Cowles Communications, for defamation. In 1977 – six years after Look had folded and after four trials in the Federal Court – a judge assigned Mr. Alflio $ 350,000 in damages. Carlson and Brison were not attributed.

In 1975, when he was at the Kabc-TV of Los Angeles, Mr. Carlson and a producer, Pete Noyes, won a Peabody for discovering fraudulent statements of G. Elizabeth Carmichael, which managed the car company of the twentieth century. Although it was a fugitive from a counterfeit arrest years earlier, he built the company around Dale, a three -wheeled car that said he could bring 70 miles to the gallon. But he never produced anything but a prototype.

One of the revelations of Mr. Carlson – in addition to the elements of the fraud for whom she was condemned and imprisoned – was that Mrs. Carmichael was Transgender.

During an interview for “The lady and the dale” (2021), a four -part HBO documentary, Carlson admitted that he intentionally used male pronouns to refer to her when he testified during his process in 1976.

Zackary Drucker, one of the directors of the documentary, that she herself is transgender, he told indiewire In 2021 he said he had cried as he interviewed Mr. Carlson.

“I was already living one day,” he said, “and the topic just went to transfobic tear, not even for Liz but for trans people.”

In 1976, when Mr. Carlson was working as anchorman for Kfmb-Tv in San Diego, he discovered that the tennis player Renee Richards was born male. Initially he denied him that he had undergone transition surgery. But after admitting him it was true, he begged that he does not report the story.

“I couldn’t do an embodity,” he wrote in his book of memories “No Way Renee: the second half of my notorious life” (2007, with John Ames). “He felt I lost the right to privacy when I appeared as a competitor in a public tennis tournament.”

Richard Carlson left journalism a year after his report on Mrs. Richards; In 1984 he said to San Diego that he considered the “Insipide, second year and superficial” television news.

Richard Carlson was born Richard Anderson on February 10, 1941 in Boston. He was born with Rachioni and legs folded because his biological mother, Dorothy Anderson, a unmarried teenager, “would deal with pregnant a secret, He wrote in an opinion for the Washington Post in 1993.

He had a few months when his mother left him in an orphanage. He found a happy temporary house in Malden, Massachusetts, with adoptive parents, and was adopted about two years later by Warner Carlson, a shell manager, and his wife, Ruth, a nurse.

Richard was 12 when his adoptive father died; Later he was imprisoned for stealing a car and expelled in high school. Shortly thereafter, he enlisted in the Navy and asked to be assigned to the Marines. He was trained as a doctor.

During his period in journalism, Tucker Carlson said in an interview, his father regularly reported Black Panthers and the mafia and made friends with Eddie Cannizzaro, who said he killed Benjamin Siegel, the mafia known as Bugsy, who helped develop Las Vegas as a refuge for Casinos.

“Cannizzaro was a great animal rescue boy, as well as my father,” Tucker Carlson said. His father, once president of a refuge, actors and others for animals, won an Emmy award for a special news on Kabc in 1972 on the inhuman conditions of refuge for dogs in Los Angeles.

After several years as a vice -president of a Bank of San Diego, Carlson raced without success for the mayor of San Diego in 1984. He started working in Washington in 1985 to be the spokesman for the United States information agency and became the interim director of Voice of America a year later, under President Ronald Reagan. He was later confirmed by the Senate and served until 1991.

“I consider myself enormously lucky to have been under the voice during his most interesting moment, if not one of his most interesting moments”, He said in “The Paul Leslie Hour”, a podcast, in 2024, “And to have seen the changes that occurred from the moment I arrived, because our concentration was on the Soviet Union in many ways.”

After leaving Voice of America, Carlson carried out several works in the 90s, including Ambassador to Seychelles, the island nation in the Indian Ocean; CEO of non -profit company for public transmission; And President of a King World Productions division that has union “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and other programs. In the 2000s, he was vice -president of the Foundation for the defense of democracies, an anti -terrorism Think Tank.

In addition to his son Tucker, Mr. Carlson survived another son, Buckley and five grandchildren. His marriage to Patricia Swanson, a family member who founded the frozen food empire Swanson, ended with his death in 2023. Her previous marriage to Lisa McNear, the mother of her children, ended with divorce. Mr. Carlson raised their children.

In 1990, Carlson promoted a plan by the American government to build a 400 million dollar short -wave relay station in the Negev desert in Israel to increase the strength of the voice of American signals to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

“Not long ago our broadcasts were jammed by the Soviet Union”, he said In a press conference in Tel Aviv. “Not long ago we were in a war aimed at words and ideas. Now it is a market of words and ideas, and this relay station is very important for that market.”

Three years later, the Clinton administration sank the transmitter.