When right-wing Fox News talking head and golden child Tucker Carlson was fired last week, it sent shock waves through not just his industry—the punditocracy—but across the landscape. Carlson, after all, was the firebrand of all firebrands occupying cable news. Each evening, his program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, won the ratings war with an estimated three million nightly viewers.
Carlson was his network’s 800-pound gorilla, seemingly invulnerable to critics and able to say the most tasteless and racist things with the tacit approval of his network. The New York Times once called his program “the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful.”
But then something happened, and Carlson and his network got caught up in a legal riptide when a New York court ruled against it and awarded the Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million in its defamation lawsuit. Dominion had sued Fox, arguing that the network had continually broadcast stories—lies—accusing it of surreptitiously miscounting millions of votes that ultimately led to Donald Trump’s defeat in the last presidential election. Fox’ deceit also proved invaluable to Trump as he primed his base with regurgitation of the same baseless falsehoods in interviews and on the internet.
But while Carlson is a symptom of the evolution of television news, said journalism professor Alfredo Sanchez, in many ways he is also today’s point of the spear. The Metropolitan State University-Denver professor said Carlson reflects the polarized state of the electorate. He is also a product of the 24-hour news cycle that has replaced the one-or two-hour newscasts of earlier decades.
“Having bureaus all over the world,” said Sanchez, “is expensive.” Networks found it more cost efficient to “bring in a host and that host would bring two guests.” They would discuss a single subject, maybe two, and the idea caught fire. Today, cable news runs on a diet of panels, talking heads chatting, arguing about the big stories of the day. Adopting this formula, ‘discussion and opinion,’ he said, “became cheaper to produce.” This ‘rage against the machine’ format became the norm on both right and left-leaning networks.
But Carlson took the inferno of rage that has been his stock-in-trade along with the former presidents to a whole different level. He has fueled the fire by propagating the ‘great replacement’ theory, that immigrants are coming to replace White voters thus assuring Democrats of control of the future direction of the country. He calls immigrants ‘dirty,’ and accuses them of bringing disease to the country; he regularly says immigrants want to change the culture, the charge aimed at the hearts and minds of Trump voters. He has also praised Vladimir Putin, his defense, that “Putin never called me a rac- ist.” His white-hot rhetoric has caused sponsors to flee and at the same time made ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ the highest-rated cable news show in history.
“The damage that it has done has been tremendous,” said Sanchez. “It has created a hugely diverse and divided society.” But, at the same time, the Carlson syndrome has made Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch and his network enormously successful and not likely to change its approach.
Of course, this isn’t the first mega-host Fox has evicted for egregious behavior. Glenn Beck was an early Fox host who famously declared that President Obama “has a deep-seeded hatred for White people or the White culture.” Beck was fired but his comment was overlooked.
Carlson’s predecessor and network cash cow Bill O’Reilly was unceremoniously dumped over a track record of sexual harassment. The network paid out more than $32 million to O’Reilly’s accusers.
The network has been a been a regular ATM for women successful in proving patterns of sexual harass- ment. Among them are Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson (no relation to Mr. Carlson). In the latter’s case, Fox settled for a reported $20 million. In both women’s cases, Fox Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes was the defendant.
While Carlson’s tasteless and racist attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement, the transgendered community and other groups was tolerated or even endorsed by Fox, his support for the insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the 2020 election seemingly won full support from Fox executives. The Fox audience, much of which was insurrectionist, said Murdoch, was ‘not red or blue, it is green’ as in dollars and cents.
But it may not have been Carlson’s incendiary on-air arrows aimed at the left that sealed his fate. Instead, it may have been comments he made in depositions, emails and text messages that Dominion turned up as it prepared to go to trial. It is reported that he regularly trashed Sydney Powell, one of Fox’s prominent talking heads guests made famous by her linking Dominion to the late Venezuelan strongman, Hugo Chavez; he also texted that he hated Donald Trump “with a passion,” and that “he (Trump) is to blame for everything…and a demonic force.”
Contemporary history is dotted with racist demagogues, but Carlson has secured his place among the most vicious. Many have said Carlson, the scion to the Swanson Food empire, ranks near or, at least, shoulder to shoulder with the 1940’s Father Edward Coughlin, a Catholic priest who in the 1930’s ruled America’s radio airwaves. Coughlin commanded an estimated audience of 30 million listeners each week and did it with a venomous enthusiasm, even lending support to what Hitler was doing as he prepared for war.
“When we get through with the Jews of America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing,” was one of Coughlin’s most hateful, antisemitic rants. Carlson’s rants were not that ugly. But in the end, like Icarus, his inability to read the room and continue ranting recklessly ultimately caused him to also fly too close to the sun and end with a similar result.
