The father of the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, he won a Peabody Award for television reporting that uncovered a car company’s fraud.
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.