Early life

Carlson was raised in a Lutheran family in Anoka, Minnesota, the daughter of Karen and Lee Carlson. She is of Swedish descent. Her father owned a car dealership with her uncle. She has two brothers and one sister. Her grandfather was the pastor of the then second-largest Lutheran church in the United States. She graduated from Anoka-Hennepin School District 11's Anoka High School, where she was the 1984 class valedictorian. One of her childhood nannies was Michele Bachmann, the future Republican congresswoman.

Growing up, Carlson was an accomplished violinist, winning numerous local and national competitions. She performed as a soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra as an 8th grader and was the concertmistress for the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony. Carlson spent five summers studying at the prestigious Aspen Music Festival and School in Aspen, Colorado. Winner of several concerto competitions at the MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis, she was also featured as a soloist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

In 1984, Carlson was elected as one of the Anoka Homecoming attendants. She won the title of Miss Minnesota in 1988 and became the third woman from Minnesota to win the Miss America title. For the talent competition, Carlson played Zigeunerweisen, the violin composition of Sarasate.

Carlson graduated from Stanford University in 1990 with a degree in sociology (organizational behavior). While at Stanford University, she studied abroad at Oxford University.

In September 2011, Carlson was named to the inaugural class of the Anoka High School Hall of Fame.

Career

Carlson originally gained recognition as the co-anchor of the Saturday Early Show on CBS along with Russ Mitchell. She joined CBS News as a correspondent in 2000 and began working on The Early Show in 2002. Before her tenure at CBS, Carlson served as a weekend anchor and reporter for KXAS-TV in Dallas, Texas, and was an anchor and reporter at WOIO-TV in Cleveland, Ohio, and for WCPO-TV, in Cincinnati. She began her television career in Richmond, Virginia, as a political reporter for WRIC-TV. She began her media career in a franchise called Neighborhood News.

Carlson was moved to Fox & Friends initially as a weekend substitute host. But on September 25, 2006, a shifting of anchors, which included E.D. Hill moving to the 10 a.m. hour of Fox News Live, opened a weekday slot on Fox & Friends, which Carlson filled. She co-hosted with Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade for several years. Carlson left Fox & Friends in September 2013 to anchor a one-hour daytime program beginning in the fall of 2013, taking part of the slot opened by Megyn Kelly's move to primetime.

In July 2014, Carlson appeared in the movie Persecuted as journalist Diana Lucas.

"Hostile enemy" comment

On Fox & Friends, during a January 10, 2007, interview with Dan Bartlett, counselor to then-president George W. Bush, Carlson labeled Democratic U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy a "hostile enemy" of the United States, "right here on the home front." Bartlett replied, "Well, we don't view Ted Kennedy as a hostile enemy. We do view him to be an open and often critic of the war. He has been from the very outset. I don't think that's anything new." Keith Olbermann chose her as that day's "Worst Person in the World" on that night's broadcast of his show Countdown, while Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post called it "the Fox News exchange of the day" and asked, "Doesn't the Constitution allow for dissent?"

Personal life

On October 4, 1997, Carlson married sports agent Casey Close. They live in Greenwich, Connecticut with their two children. She announced on Fox & Friends on June 9, 2009 (also repeated on Glenn Beck's Fox News program), that her parents' car dealership had been selected for closing as part of the General Motors reorganization and bankruptcy on June 1, 2009. A year later the Star Tribune reported that "It took an act of Congress, a national TV appeal and maybe a little bit of history on the owners' side, but Main Motor, the Anoka car dealership that Lee and Karen Carlson's family has owned for 91 years, will keep its General Motors dealership after all."

[ Source: Wikipedia ]