Richard Carlson, who won a Peabody Award for his investigative television reports about an automobile company’s brazen fraud — during which he also outed the company’s founder as a transgender woman — and who later ran Voice of America during the last years of the Cold War, died on March 24 at his home in Boca Grande, Fla. He was 84.
His son Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator and former Fox News host, said the cause was pneumonia.
The younger Mr. Carlson said that his father, who strongly believed in the role of Voice of America, did not know before his death about President Trump’s executive order aimed at dismantling the government-funded broadcaster. A federal judge temporarily blocked the plan on Friday.
Voice of America provides news programming in 49 languages to dozens of countries where citizens have limited access to independent journalism, including China and Iran.
In 1988, it was looking at new opportunities to reach people in the Soviet Union because of efforts by the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to open up society.
“Our most important job is supplying what Maestro Rostropovich once described as ‘daily bread for people,’ and that is what we are doing, intellectually feeding hungry people,” Mr. Carlson told The New York Times in 1988. He was referring to the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who championed artistic freedom in the Soviet Union.
Mr. Carlson, who was known as Dick, became smitten with journalism years before he entered government service. Starting in the early 1960s, he was a copy boy at The Los Angeles Times, a reporter for United Press International, a freelance reporter, and a TV journalist.
He collaborated with another journalist, Lance Brisson, on an exposé for Look magazine in 1969 that accused Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco of having ties to Mafia figures. Mr. Alioto sued Look’s owner, Cowles Communications, for libel. In 1977 — six years after Look had folded and following four trials in federal court — a judge awarded Mr. Alioto $350,000 in damages. Mr. Carlson and Mr. Brisson were not defendants.
In 1975, when he was at KABC-TV in Los Angeles, Mr. Carlson and a producer, Pete Noyes, won a Peabody for uncovering fraudulent claims by G. Elizabeth Carmichael, who ran the Twentieth Century Motor Car Company. Even while she was a fugitive from a counterfeiting arrest years before, she built the company around the Dale, a three-wheeled car that she said could get 70 miles to the gallon. But she never produced anything more than a prototype.
One of Mr. Carlson’s revelations — in addition to the elements of the fraud for which she was convicted and imprisoned — was that Ms. Carmichael was transgender.
During an interview for “The Lady and the Dale” (2021), a four-part HBO documentary, Mr. Carlson admitted that he purposely used male pronouns to refer to her when he testified during her trial in 1976.
Zackary Drucker, one of the documentary’s directors, who herself is transgender, told IndieWire in 2021 said that she had cried while interviewing Mr. Carlson.
“I was having a day already,” she said, “and the subject just went on a transphobic tear, not even about Liz but about trans people.”
In 1976, when Mr. Carlson was working as an anchorman for KFMB-TV in San Diego, he discovered that the tennis player Renee Richards had been born male. She initially denied to him that she had had transition surgery. But after conceding to him that it was true, she pleaded that he not report the story.
“I couldn’t make a dent,” she wrote in her memoir “No Way Renee: The Second Half of My Notorious Life” (2007, with John Ames). “He felt that I had lost my right to privacy when I appeared as a contestant in a public tennis tournament.”
Richard Carlson left journalism a year after his report on Ms. Richards; he told San Diego magazine in 1984 that he considered television news “insipid, sophomoric and superficial.”
Richard Warner Carlson was born Richard Anderson on Feb. 10, 1941, in Boston. He was born with rickets and bent legs because his biological mother, Dorothy Anderson, an unmarried teenager, “starved herself to keep her pregnancy a secret, he wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post in 1993.
He was a few months old when his mother left him at an orphanage. He found a happy temporary home in Malden, Mass., with foster parents, and was adopted about two years later by Warner Carlson, a tannery manager, and his wife, Ruth, a nurse.
Richard was 12 when his adoptive father died; he was later jailed for stealing a car and expelled from high school. Soon after that, he enlisted in the Navy and asked to be assigned to the Marines. He was trained as a medic.
During his time in journalism, Tucker Carlson said in an interview, his father reported regularly about the Black Panthers and the Mafia and befriended Eddie Cannizzaro, who claimed to have killed Benjamin Siegel, the mobster known as Bugsy, who helped develop Las Vegas as a haven for casinos.
“Cannizzaro was a big animal-rescue guy, and so was my father,” Tucker Carlson said. His father, once the president of a shelter, Actors and Others for Animals, won an Emmy Award for a news special on KABC in 1972 about inhumane shelter conditions for dogs in Los Angeles.
After several years as the vice president of a bank in San Diego, Mr. Carlson ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Diego in 1984. He began working in Washington in 1985 to be the spokesman for the United States Information Agency and became the acting 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 fortunate to have been at the Voice during probably its most interesting time, if not one of its most interesting times,” he said on “The Paul Leslie Hour,” a podcast, in 2024, “and to have watched the changes that took place from the time I arrived, because our concentration was on the Soviet Union in many ways.”
After leaving Voice of America, Mr. Carlson held several jobs in the 1990s, including ambassador to the Seychelles, the island nation in the Indian Ocean; chief executive of the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting; and president of a division of King World Productions that syndicated “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and other programs. In the 2000s, he was vice chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an antiterrorism think tank.
In addition to his son Tucker, Mr. Carlson is survived by another son, Buckley, and five grandchildren. His marriage to Patricia Swanson, a member of the family that founded the Swanson frozen food empire, ended with her death in 2023. His earlier marriage to Lisa McNear, the mother of his sons, ended in divorce. Mr. Carlson raised their sons.
In 1990, Mr. Carlson promoted a plan by the American government to build a $400 million shortwave relay station in the Negev desert in Israel to increase the strength of the Voice of America’s signals to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
“Not long ago our broadcasts were jammed by the Soviet Union,” he said at a news conference in Tel Aviv. “Not long ago we were in a tense war of words and ideas. Now it is a marketplace of words and ideas, and this relay station is very important to that market.”
Three years later, the Clinton administration scuttled the transmitter.