Tucker Carlson served up a juicy reminder this week that before CNN anchor Jake Tapper was lecturing America from behind the “straight news” desk, he was apparently helping Hooters fend off discrimination complaints in Washington.
The revelation came during Carlson’s appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show, where the two former Fox News heavyweights were discussing the latest media and political pile-on against critics of U.S. intervention overseas and critics of Israel policy.
The conversation turned to a recent segment on Tapper’s CNN program featuring Reps. Mike Lawler and Josh Gottheimer. The pair pushed a resolution condemning what they described as antisemitic rhetoric online — and Lawler specifically accused Carlson of “promoting anti-Semitic hate speech.” Carlson wasn’t impressed.
“It’s just amazing to see Jake Tapper abetting something like this,” Carlson told Kelly. “I remember when he was a lobbyist for Hooters, thinking about becoming a journalist. He was literally a lobbyist for Hooters. I knew him well.”
Kelly practically fell out of her chair. “What?!” she blurted out.
“Oh yeah, oh absolutely,” Carlson replied.
“I did not know that,” Kelly laughed, before adding with a grin: “I mean, I could get behind it.”
The exchange instantly lit up social media because it was true.
Long before becoming one of CNN’s top Trump antagonists, Tapper worked at the bipartisan D.C. public relations powerhouse Powell Tate in the mid-1990s, where one of his assignments involved representing Hooters during a legal battle over the restaurant chain’s all-female waitstaff policy. Tapper himself has acknowledged the gig publicly.
Speaking on the Dedicated podcast last year, the CNN host laughed about the now-infamous chapter of his résumé.
“I worked for a public relations firm called Powell Tate,” Tapper explained. “It was a bipartisan firm. And we worked for whatever clients we got. And Hooters, in the Clinton years, was being threatened with a lawsuit from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for not hiring men as Hooters girls. And yeah, I worked on the Hooters case.”
He added, “I was 24, 25, and working for a PR firm to pay the rent while I figured out what I wanted to do.”
At the time, Hooters was fighting accusations that its hiring practices discriminated against men by reserving its signature “Hooters Girl” jobs exclusively for women. The chain argued the servers were part of the restaurant’s entertainment brand — not just standard waitstaff. The controversy became one of the more memorable culture-war legal fights of the Clinton era, back when corporate America still occasionally defended itself instead of immediately surrendering to activist pressure.
And Tapper didn’t merely fetch coffee during the dispute. A 1995 Baltimore Sun article quoted him directly as a spokesman for the company.
“‘Hooters girls are the attraction of the restaurant,’” Tapper said at the time. “It might not be for everybody, but it’s honest work, the girls keep their clothes on.”
Critics on the right have long accused Tapper of playing partisan hall monitor while pretending to occupy the neutral middle ground of journalism. Carlson’s dig landed because it punctured the carefully cultivated image of CNN’s serious-minded anchor by reminding viewers that plenty of Beltway media stars once spent years spinning for political causes, activist groups, or corporate clients before reinventing themselves as objective truth-tellers.
Tapper’s pre-CNN résumé also included work for Democratic politicians and for Handgun Control Inc., the gun-control advocacy group now known as the Brady Center.
None of that disqualifies him from journalism, of course. Washington is full of reporters who crossed over from politics and public relations. But it does make the media establishment’s constant pearl-clutching over “misinformation” and ideological bias look a little rich. Especially when the guy wagging his finger at everyone else once had to explain to reporters why only women could serve chicken wings in orange shorts.
