FNC’s Carlson: Simon & Schuster Will Publish My Account of Their Censorship

On his Thursday broadcast, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson revealed that Simon & Schuster agreed to publish his forthcoming book, “The Long Slide,” which he said included a reporting on Simon & Schuster’s decision not to publish Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) book earlier this year.

Carlson called that a form of censorship.

The book, out in August, includes interviews with Simon & Schuster executives, according to Carlson.

“Simon & Schuster is not the government,” he explained. “It is a private company. But Hawley’s point of the First Amendment is real — what good is free speech if you can’t exercise it?  But for me personally, what happened to Josh Hawley with more than an academic question. At the time his book was canceled, I was also under contract to produce a book for Simon & Schuster — a collection of magazine journalism. Simon & Schuster was paying me to do it, but it still seemed cowardly not to address directly what they had done to Josh Hawley.”

“So, I called the head of the company, the CEO Jon Karp of the company, and I told him that I thought canceling a book for partisan reasons was disgusting and wrong, and it set a very bad precedent for American publishing,” Carlson continued. “Then I told him I wanted to write about in my new book as a kind of snapshot of what was happening across the country. So, I started to report on it. In the end, I interviewed Jon Karp and other Simon & Schuster executives at some length and on the record. I asked them under what circumstances are you willing to censor the political views of your authors?”

“It turned out to be an amazing series of conversations,” he added. “They were highly uncomfortable, as you can imagine, but fascinating. Their answers, some of them honest, some of them lies — revealed in the clearest possible way how Corporate America undermined free speech and the country itself. Last week, Simon & Schuster confirmed that they will publish my account of their censorship. CEO Jon Karp said he will come on this show to explain what he had done and attempt to justify it. We assume he will keep his word. We hope so. That book comes out of the week of August 10. You can preorder it now.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor