Fox News Media and its top-rated host Tucker Carlson parted ways on Monday (April 24).
Carlson was the biggest attraction on the US’s most-watched cable news network, with his prime-time programme “Tucker Carlson Tonight” among the highest rated on US cable TV. However, he also was a source of constant controversy, drawing criticism for his incendiary rhetoric and platforming of known conspiracy theorists.
His expulsion from Fox News comes on the back of one such, extremely expensive, controversy, where parent company Fox Corp settled for $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit in which Carlson played a starring role.
Since leaving Fox News, Tucker Carlson spoke for the first time on April 26, taking aim at mainstream media and the US political system in a two-minute long recorded statement. “Both political parties and their donors have reached consensus on what benefits them and they actively collude to shut down any conversation about it,” Carlson said, according to Reuters.
Tucker Carlson was let go by Fox on the back of the recent Dominion lawsuit, which Fox settled for $787.5 million.
Dominion Voting Systems alleged in its lawsuit that Carlson allowed debunked election-fraud claims about the voting-technology firm to air on his show, while casting doubts on the plausibility of those claims in private messages that emerged in legal filings. The New York Times reported that the contents of Carslon’s texts, even more damaging than what is publicly known, were possibly behind Fox’s massive last-minute settlement with Dominion.
A Washington Post report claims that Carlson’s texts criticizing Fox executives that were uncovered during the Dominion lawsuit were another possible reason for his ouster.
Fox is also being sued by one of Carlson’s former producers, Abby Grossberg, who accused the network of being openly sexist and said Carlson’s staff in particular denigrated women and Jewish people, Vox reported. While Fox has steadfastly denied these claims, experts in the US say that Carlson’s steady tryst with controversy finally brought his time with Fox to an end.
“Carlson’s Fox News run was defined by controversies over various and frequent racist, sexist, and transphobic comments he made, as well as the conspiracy theories he spread about everything from cattle mutilations to Covid-19’s origins and the January 6 riots,” a Vox article said.
Despite Fox News’s statement that implied the decision was mutual, Carlson reportedly didn’t know he’d been cut until minutes before it was announced. Carlson had signed off on Friday with, “We’ll be back on Monday,” indicating that he expected there would be a Monday show.
Tucker Carlson was unarguably Fox’s biggest star host, with massive popularity with the US right-wing audiences as well as GOP members. Republican US Representative Lauren Boebert, who has been a staunch Trump supporter, was quick to back Carlson. “I stand with Tucker Carlson!” she tweeted shortly after the news broke. Others have criticised Fox for crumbling to “pressure from the US political establishment”.
Carlson regularly averaged over 3 million viewers (a night), making his show one of the highest-rated on all of basic cable. He led Fox News’s ratings for years. However, experts have questioned how deeply this will impact Fox in the long run.
“It’s the platform that pulls the strings, not the person. Someone equally odious will replace him”, The Guardian columnist Emma Brockes wrote. Currently, a number of rotating interim hosts are taking over Carlson’s primetime slots until a more permanent replacement can be identified.
As for Carlson himself, given his popularity and the sheer audience he pulled on a daily basis, an exit from Fox is unlikely to end his career in the media. But why is he so popular? After all, there are many across the US media space who reflect similar opinions and pick up the same issues.
Experts say that Carlson’s success and massive personality cult come from his ability to frame his takes (regardless of what they are) as anti-establishment, tapping into people’s deep-seated anxieties in a changing United States.
“He sanitises and legitimises right-wing conspiratorial thinking, dodges when you try to nail him down on the specifics, then wraps it all in an argument about censorship and free speech. He has a way of talking about culture and politics that is rooted in defiance: defiance of elites, defiance of the federal government, defiance of scientific consensus. And it has won him the loyalty of millions of Americans who are already suspicious of everything he questions,” Charlotte Alter wrote for Time magazine in 2021.
Many have referred to him as the most powerful conservative voice in the US. In a country which is as polarised as ever, Tucker Carlson’s posturing on issues generates constant engagement by manufacturing outrage – whether it be on the right (especially the extreme white supremacist right) or the left. While this has often scared off advertisers, Carlson has thrived as a self-proclaimed populist and a “man of the real Americans”.
As his time with Fox News comes to an end, there is speculation regarding what he will do next. Some analysts have pointed out that Carlson has enough of a personal following to “go full Joe Rogan” – start his own show online, unaffiliated to any media network. His own comments chastising the state of American news media have kept the door open to this possibility.
Regardless of where he resurfaces (and when) one thing is for certain: this is not the last we have heard of Tucker Carlson.