Carlson is a smarter version of the corporate news man who realized that the game was up and started his exit strategy early on. Recognizing that there was no future there, he started breaking their rules and telling certain truths in order to gather more and more audience for when they eventually pulled the cord on him. So he nurtured an audience as a truth teller in an dishonest industry not because he was particularly honest, (he would have never been hired in the first place if he was really an honest man,) but because he saw the opportunity to steal the audience away.
I think that he wants to be a simple, honest man, in the same way that an alcoholic wants to be a sober and disciplined man, but he's still an alcoholic.
So, you can go to tucker for interesting conversations, peppered with hard truths, because that's his brand. And Tucker, at this point, may want to be a genuine human being, but he's still playing at it. His father was a corpo journalist, his mother an heiress of the Swanson family fortune. He tried to join the CIA as a young man before spending decades in the lugenpresse. That's who he is, at his core.
So, give him your attention, but don't be fooled. He's only a smarter devil. Smart enough to know that the story ends with Satan bleeding out on the point of a spear.