Richard Carlson, a controversial fixture in West Coast TV journalism during the 1970s, died Monday at his Florida home after a long illness.
Carlson’s death was announced by his son Tucker, the conservative pundit and former Fox News host, in a post on X.
Richard Carlson, who started his award-winning career as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Times, became a familiar presence to Los Angeles TV viewers as an investigative reporter for KABC. He also worked at KGO in San Francisco and KFMB in San Diego.
While at KABC, Carlson aggressively reported on the fall of G. Elizabeth Carmichael, a transgender woman who developed a three-wheeled electric car when the country was dealing with skyrocketing gas prices. Carmichael never produced the car and was convicted for defrauding investors.
Carlson, whose reporting revealed that Carmichael was transgender, was featured prominently in a 2021 HBO documentary about the entrepreneur, “The Lady and the Dale.” Carlson remained unrepentant about outing Carmichael, telling her documentarians, “If Liz’s behavior is normal, then so too is Jeffrey Dahmer’s.”
While working at KFMB, he outed transgender professional tennis player Renée Richards after she won a women’s singles division title in a La Jolla tournament.
Carlson left journalism shortly after the Richards story, saying he was disillusioned by the global sensation it generated. “There are so many interesting things I think are important and interesting, but the media can be counted on to do handstands over that kind of scandal and sexual sensation,” he told The Times in 1984.
Richard Carlson was born on Feb. 10, 1941. His mother was a 15-year-old Swedish-speaking girl who placed him in an orphanage in Boston. After years in foster homes, Calrson was adopted by a family in Norwood, Mass.
Carlson’s adoptive father, a tannery manager, died when he was 12. He became a juvenile delinquent, arrested and jailed at 17 for car theft. He eventually enlisted in the Marine Corps and was a merchant seaman before pursuing a career in journalism, according to Tucker Carlson’s post.
After his military service, Richard Carlson joined The Times, where he became friends with Carl Brisson, the son of actress Rosalind Russell. They formed a journalistic partnership that included a Look magazine report that linked former San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto to organized crime, ending his political career.
Alioto called the article “character assassination for political purposes” and eventually won a $350,000 libel award. Carlson was not named as a defendant in the case.
In 1971, Carlson moved to TV station KABC where he earned a Peabody Award for an investigative report on car promotion fraud. He moved to KFMB as a reporter and anchor in 1975.
Carlson’s first wife left him in 1975, leaving him as a single father to raise Tucker and his brother, Buckley. He remarried in 1979 to Patricia Swanson, the heiress to the frozen-food company, who died in 2023.
After leaving television, Carlson joined Great American Federal, a San Diego-based savings and loan. He toyed with a career in politics, making an unsuccessful bid to become mayor of San Diego in 1984 against incumbent Roger Hedgecock, who was under indictment for perjury at the time.
In 1985, Carlson moved to Washington to work for the Reagan administration. He spent five years as the director of the Voice of America, and then moved to the Seychelles as the U.S. ambassador. In 1992, he became the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides federal funding to public media.
In 1997, Carlson joined King World, the syndication company that distributed “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” before it was sold to CBS in 1999. He later served as vice chairman for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based neoconservative think tank.
Along with his two sons, Carlson is survived by five grandchildren.
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