“And you know if you bump up against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it,” Carlson said. “That’s not a guess; it’s guaranteed. Every person who works in English language media understands that. The rule of what you can’t say defines everything.”
Carlson, the former host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News, exited the company after Fox News settled Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million.
Carlson first joined Fox News as a contributor in 2009, and in 2017, Carlson took over the network’s 8 p.m. hour after Bill O’Reilly was forced out. Carlson was one of the most-watched hosts on the cable news network, with an average audience of 3.2 million viewers.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took to Twitter to say that she “can’t wait” for Carlson’s new show.
“The truth will be unstoppable,” Greene said.
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#Tucker #Carlson #relaunch #show #Twitter
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The point of this inquiry isn’t to provide Carlson any relief — he deserves all the scrutiny his firing has brought him — but to examine the motives of the unnamed sources who have risen against him in recent days. Why have so many powerful actors chosen this moment to slag Carlson, when none of the behaviors described clash with the way he’s carried on for years? One possibility is that people who are working for Fox have assembled a PR campaign to discredit the network’s former star that will throw the press pack off doing additional coverage on the Dominion case. It’s like a fighter jet releasing a flare to fool an enemy’s heat-seeking missile. Why theorize in this direction? Because the story that’s currently being put out there just doesn’t add up.
According to the Times and the Post, the Fox board got spooked when it saw the unredacted message (Exhibit 276 from the case) in which Carlson texted about his reaction to the beating of a purported Antifa member. Writes the Times, “The text alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before Fox was set to defend itself against Dominion Voting Systems before a jury. The board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when Mr. Carlson was on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions about the company.”
Why should this text message “alarm” the Fox board, which includes Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, William A. Burck, Chase Carey, Anne Dias, Roland A. Hernandez, Jacques Nasser and Paul Ryan, when Carlson routinely said much more inflammatory things on his program? Perhaps the board has never tuned in to hear Carlson’s gems about the “great replacement theory” or about immigrants making the country “poorer, and dirtier and more divided” or know about his blatant white nationalist sentiments or viewed the episode in which he argued the January 6 Capitol riot was a largely peaceful demonstration. Perhaps board members missed these salient facts about Carlson because they don’t even own televisions. This might explain why their hair turned white when they read what was, by Carlson standards, a fairly anodyne text. But who wants to give the board this sort of slack?
You can believe the board was troubled by the Carlson text, and you can believe that Fox might have fretted about the board-ordered investigation of Carlson that the Times reports, without taking the leap that the board was intervening at this late date to limit Fox’s exposure in the Dominion case. As the Times piece itself reported, “It was not guaranteed that the text would have been revealed in open court.” That sounds right. As juicy as Exhibit 276 might be, it doesn’t have any immediate relevance to the Dominion case, so why would Dominion lawyers, who assembled a wealth of damning stuff pertinent to their case, wander off the fairway into the rough with the Carlson comment?
Additionally, even though Carlson permitted stolen-election claims to be aired on his show, he was not the worst offender at Fox. Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro broadcast more of the claims, something Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch admitted. It’s not apparent at all that Carlson was the prime focus of Fox’s legal worries in the Dominion case. (Though he faced specific exposure in a separate workplace harassment case filed by a woman who had formerly worked on his show.) So can we really believe that his firing was connected to the Dominion case when Fox hosts like Pirro and Bartiromo still work for the network?
No evidence exists that proves the extended coverage of Carlson is designed to move the discussion off of Fox and onto its erstwhile anchor. But the steady flow of leaked material — including the Times and Post stories as well as a series of embarrassing off-air recordings uncovered by the activist site Media Matters for America — point to the possibility of an after-the-firing campaign to make Carlson the personification of the network’s rot when the infection goes much deeper.
People connected to the Fox case might be leaking information on Carlson to burn him before he burns them. If that’s true, they should beware. As Ben Smith wrote in his Times column in June 2021, Carlson has been a good source for political reporters in the past. “It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides,” one unnamed reporter for a prominent publication told Smith.
Dominion vs. Fox may have been settled, but Fox vs. Carlson will rage on.
******
Name your anonymous sources in an email to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed wants to leak. I haven’t visited my Mastodon and Post accounts in weeks. My Substack Notes account is not worth following. My RSS feed wants to be sued.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Fox News has finally broken ties with its most popular star, Tucker Carlson. His ousting has been bemoaned by some commentators, who have taken Carlson to be a rebellious anti-war populist, evading easy political characterization. But is it really so complicated to classify Carlson’s political ideology?
In late February 2022, then Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, began a pro-Russia monologue urging his audience to ask themselves the question: “Why do I hate Putin so much?” The gist of Carlson’s comments about Russia’s leader is that Putin should not be regarded as an enemy. Instead, the real enemies of America are those who call white Americans racist, those who teach so-called critical race theory in schools, business elites who ship jobs abroad, and those who imposed Covid lockdowns on the United States.
In short, Carlson urged, the real enemies of America are internal – racial minorities, doctors and politicians, professors and educators, and large corporations who shift jobs to other countries. Carlson has been resolutely against US support for Ukraine. Insofar as Carlson has since that point gone to war, it has rather been against these supposed internal enemies.
So, is Tucker Carlson hard to classify? On the one hand, he spreads tropes central to neo-Nazi propaganda, such as “white replacement” theory, suggesting that leftist elites seek to replace “legacy Americans” by foreign non-white immigrants. On the other hand, he denounces media, intellectual and political elites, as well as US intervention in Ukraine, platforming those who identify as the “anti-war left”, such as Jimmy Dore. How should we best understand this set of views? If Carlson has fascist sympathies, as do, quite inarguably, many of those who applaud him, how do we understand his firm stance against US military and financial support for Ukraine? Surely, historically speaking, fascism is not compatible with the isolationist position Carlson has urged.
We should look to history as our guide here. But the history that best informs us in this case is not European history, but American history. Before the beginning of the second world war, all of America’s pro-fascist parties opposed US intervention on the side of its allies against Nazi Germany. Often, the opposition to the US supporting Britain against Nazi Germany was represented as “isolationism”.
There were openly fascist organizations during this time, such as the German American Bund. Somewhat more ambiguous was the America First movement. As the historian Bradley Hart recounts, in a packed America First rally in Madison Square Garden in 1941, the Montana senator Burton K Wheeler denounced “jingoistic journalists and saber-rattling bankers” who were pushing the nation into war against Germany.
While the agenda of some members of the America First movement at the time might have genuinely been pacifist, it’s quite clear that the main agenda was in fact support for Hitler. The America First movement had strong support from American fascist movements of various stripes. Its most prominent spokesperson, Charles Lindbergh, published the following words in support of his anti-war position in an essay entitled “Geography, Aviation, and Race” in Reader’s Digest in 1939:
… It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea. Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on strength too great for foreign enemies to challenge; on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence.
It is simply inarguable fact that American racial fascism has a clear isolationist tradition, especially when the wars in question are against fascist opponents.
But is Putin’s Russia fascist? In Russia, opposition politicians and journalists are regularly imprisoned or murdered. Russia has passed harsh laws against LGBTQ+ communities. Russia’s ideology is based on a militarized Russian nationalism, and its war against Ukraine is quite clearly genocidal in nature. Just as Nazi Germany represented itself as the defender of Christianity and Europe’s classic traditions against an existential threat posed by leftist atheist Jews, Putin represents Russia as the sole defender of the European Christian traditions against similar existential threats, such as “gender ideology”.
Putin’s Russia is the international leader of the global far right, promoting ultra-nationalism, religious traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across the world. If Russia is not fascist, then even Nazi Germany in the 1930s was not fascist. As the historian Timothy Snyder has urged, “we should finally say it”: Russia is fascist.
Just as claims to be isolationists by American inter-war fascists were quite rightly taken to be expressions of support for Nazi ideology, there is good reason to take Carlson’s similar claims not as denunciations of American militarism but as expressions of support for Putinism, which he seems largely to share.
What about Carlson’s scorn for the media, intellectual, financial and political elite, which he lacerates with regularity on his show? Here too there is little ambiguity. Carlson does not scorn all elites – after all, he himself was making as much as $20m a year from Fox news. He only targets certain elites. In the ideology of American fascism, the elites he targets are associated with liberal democracy and Jewish control.
American fascists have always denounced the media, intellectuals and politicians. Carlson is careful to avoid explicitly antisemitic statements. But his show is the home of anti-Soros conspiracy theories. The antisemitism in his programming is clearly dog-whistled, and Jewish organizations have been among the first to cheer his ousting. Indeed, if Carlson did not regularly denounce media, intellectual, financial and political elites, regular targets of Nazi ideology, the case for calling him an American fascist would be much less clear.
Nazi ideology supported strict gender roles – one of the central targets of the first mass Nazi book burning on 10 May 1933 was Magnus Hirschfeld’s collection of LGBTQ+ literature, the largest in the world and the largest documentation of gender fluidity (Hirschfeld coined the term “transsexual”). Carlson has used his platform to denounce transgender Americans as existential threats to Christianity. Fascists target cosmopolitan ways as existential threats to masculinity – a viewpoint Carlson also clearly shares.
Finally, fascism praises violence against democracy, valorizing violent street mobs attacking democratic processes and institutions as martyrs to the nation. Here too Tucker Carlson fits perfectly into the tradition.
It is not difficult at all to classify Tucker Carlson’s political ideology. He is an American fascist, only the latest in a long historical line.
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#Tucker #Carlson #antiwar #populist #rebel #fascist #Jason #Stanley
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
“You have got to think about the scale — I know he had an audience of three million people. There are 330 million people in the country,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said, adding that Carlson and other cable anchors have bigger sway over what lawmakers “think is wrong, versus how they can make things better.”
That response stems in part from Republican lawmakers’ disinterest in giving Carlson too much credit for the occasionally polarizing messages he broadcast on foreign policy. He waged a relentless campaign against further U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. He filmed his show in Hungary, the scene of significant democratic backsliding, and praised its far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Carlson also exerted serious pull on Donald Trump’s views on foreign policy and military issues while blocking and tackling for the former president. He defended Trump’s meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, saying that leading a country “means killing people.” And he called the outrage over Saudi Arabia’s government-sanctioned killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi “false.”
Steve Bannon claimed in 2019 that Carlson “has more influence on national security policy than many of the guys on [Trump’s] National Security Council.” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump ally, said this week on Newsmax that he and Carlson were “directly involved in persuading President Trump to ignore some of the bad advice he was getting.”
But for members of Congress, Carlson’s noisiest jeremiads against them amounted to little more than static. As South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the chamber’s No. 2 Republican, put it: “National security issues, those are for most members a responsibility they take very seriously. And, yes, there are influencers out there. But I don’t think, one way or the other, that swings votes.”
Even as allies like Gaetz rallied around the ousted host, the vast majority of Republicans whom Carlson picked on-air fights with wouldn’t directly jab him in the aftermath of his sudden departure.
“[We] probably agree on many things, but I think we have a different worldview,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), blasted by Carlson just last month for advocating “anti-American stupidity” in Russia. “My worldview is not dependent on what somebody says on cable TV.”
A common refrain among GOP lawmakers was that while Carlson’s word greatly affected Trump and the GOP base, the broader electorate is less focused and responsive to the whims of cable news.
“It’s more about what my constituents are saying to me than different individual personalities,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said.
Sullivan pointed to a letter opposing “unrestrained” additional American support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia that got signed by just three Republican senators and 16 House Republicans as proof that Carlson’s arguments struggled to find a broader audience in Congress.
“I consume most of my information from podcasts at this point,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who’s leading a new House panel countering the influence of China. Gallagher acknowledged that Carlson is “very influential, but I presume he’ll still have a massive platform.”
Other Republicans who have aligned with Carlson’s views at times said his voice won’t be missed for long. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who described Carlson as a “personal friend,” predicted the former commentator would retain influence within the Republican Party wherever he ultimately lands.
“He has a very strong following,” Hawley said. “He has a very distinctive point of view and I bet that we’ll continue to hear his voice — and I think it’s an important voice.”
And even some lawmakers who often disagreed with Carlson’s divisive foreign policy positions still praised them, underscoring that the effect of his departure on the GOP isn’t black or white.
“Whether you agree with him or not, he was one of the few people out there that every day was sort of challenging orthodoxy — you didn’t like the show, you don’t have to watch it,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said. “There’s things I don’t agree with him on. There’s things that I find that he says that are edgy and interesting.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) was among the lawmakers who opted against wading into Carlson’s departure for the same reason they avoided weighing in on CNN’s parting with anchor Don Lemon.
“I listened to both of them [Carlson and Lemon] and sometimes I agreed with them — and sometimes I didn’t,” Kennedy said. “But they always made me think, and that’s a good thing.”
One foreign-policy establishment voice on the Hill, however, wasn’t so circumspect.
“I’ve shed many tears over Tucker Carlson losing the show — many, many tears,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), whom Carlson once derisively referred to as “eyepatch McCain,” quipped in a brief interview. Crenshaw quickly added that he was being “really fucking sarcastic.”
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#Tucker #GOP #establishment #meh #gadflys #demise
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
It is a truism of the US news industry that no one is bigger than the network itself, an insight that Donald Trump – binned by Rupert Murdoch last year – may still be painfully processing, and which this week became suddenly clear to Tucker Carlson.
The former cable news host, who, it was announced on Monday, had “agreed to part ways” with the network, has hired an aggressive Hollywood lawyer – and in line with the preferred volume of the man generally, seems unlikely to go quietly. Even as the share price at Fox dropped in response to the news, wiping $500m (£400m) off its value in apparent flattery of Carlson, the question remains pertinent as to how much he, and those like him, matter as individuals.
If you are looking to fill a spare five minutes, it is an enjoyable thought experiment to rank in order of sheer flesh-crawling hideousness some of Fox News’s fallen stars. Where does Carlson place, for example, compared with Glenn Beck, the former Fox personality who, prior to his dismissal in 2011, had a shot at the title of America’s most awful man? Or Bill O’Reilly, a man who was given the boot in 2017 after news surfaced that the company had paid up to $13m in settlements to women accusing him of sexual harassment?
For a while, a sense has prevailed that these former giants – add to the list the former Fox News head Roger Ailes, ousted in 2016 in the wake of sexual harassment allegations – have been banished from frontline positions, and the hope prospers that Carlson might be among the last. The fact he has lasted this long, and the likely reasons for his departure, however, point in another direction.
For my money, Carlson – who is presently the subject of his own lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, a senior producer who alleges he was responsible for creating a misogynist and hostile work environment – edges out even O’Reilly for pure anti-charisma. If O’Reilly was gross in a standard Fox News style, in Carlson’s case it was his very blandness, the Tintin hair and look of perpetual confusion, that made him more objectionable than all of his predecessors.
It is always fascinating to consider the tipping point at which behaviour previously tolerated by Fox becomes suddenly intolerable to the company – and for Carlson, it seems unlikely it’s the Grossberg lawsuit. It might not even be his role in fanning the flames of the January 6 riot that has just cost the company $787.5m in settlement money to shut down the lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.
Had it gone to trial, Carlson would surely have been a liability, given the way he encouraged viewers to regard the presidential election as rigged. At the same time, behind the scenes, he was lambasting Trump’s lawyers for selling a line to the public that Carlson himself seems not to have believed. “You’ve convinced them that Trump will win,” he wrote to an attorney for Trump in November 2020. “If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.”
More irksome to his employers, however, might have been his off-the-cuff comments about Trump at a time when Fox officially still backed the former president. In early January 2021, in an exchange with members of his staff, Carlson wrote: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” and: “I hate him passionately.”
I dare say Murdoch hated Trump, too, at that point, but for a network like Fox, it is dangerous to show the workings of the sausage machine too closely. There comes a point where the gap between the true feelings of network bosses and the line they are selling to viewers becomes so large that even those at the back who aren’t paying attention may catch a whiff of the true venality of the operation.
The most surprising thing to have come out since Carlson’s departure, however, is the breakdown in viewing figures. At the time of his ousting, Carlson was the highest rated cable news host in the US, pulling in more than 3 million viewers nightly. By contrast, Chris Hayes over on MSNBC attracts around 1.3 million viewers and Anderson Cooper, the most boring man on television, scores around 700,000 on CNN in that time slot.
These are decent figures. But dig down into the details, and among viewers aged between 25 and 54 – the most attractive demographic – Carlson hovered around the 330,000 mark. This is more than his rivals, for sure, but is still a tiny number of people relative to the sheer amount of oxygen this man has taken up over the last five years.
He will write a book. He’ll launch a podcast. He may accept a flippantly offered $25m job opportunity from the far-right news channel OAN. As with his predecessors, the memory of Carlson will fade quickly to irrelevance as we’re reminded it’sthe platform that pulls the strings, not the person. Someone equally odious will replace him.
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#terrible #truth #sacking #Tucker #Carlson #odious #replace #Emma #Brockes
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
The most irresponsible thing you can do these days is look away from the worst-case scenario.” So says Rick Wilson. In the week Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, Wilson’s worst-case scenario is this: a successful Carlson campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Wilson is a longtime Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and a media company, Resolute Square, for which he hosts the Enemies List podcast.
He says: “Tucker is one of the very small number of political celebrities in this country who has the name ID, the personal wealth, the stature to actually declare and run for president and in a Republican primary run in the same track Donald Trump did: the transgressive, bad boy candidate, the one who lets you say what you want to say, think what you want to think, act how you want to act, no matter how grotesque it is.
“Among Republicans, he’s a beloved figure. He’s right now in the Republican universe a martyr – and there ain’t nothing they want more than a martyr.”
Carlson’s martyrdom came suddenly on Monday, in the aftermath of the settled Dominion Voter Systems defamation suit over Trump’s election lies and their broadcast by Fox News. The prime-time host, a ratings juggernaut, was gone.
On Wednesday night, the New York Times reported that Carlson’s dismissal involved “highly offensive and crude remarks” in messages included in the Dominion suit, if redacted in court filings. Carlson, 53, released a cryptic video in which he said: “Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some … see you soon.”
Other than that, he has not hinted what’s next. To many, a presidential campaign may seem unthinkable. To Wilson, that is precisely the reason to think it.
Before Trump launched in 2016, “people used to say, ‘Trump? There’s no way he’ll run. He’s a clown. He’s a reality TV guy. Nobody ever is gonna take that seriously’ … right up until he won the nomination. And then they said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it can’t be that bad. What could possibly be as bad as you think?’ Well, everything.
“And so I think we live in a world where the most irresponsible thing you can do is look away from the worst-case scenario. I do believe that if Tucker ran for president, there is an argument to be made that he’s the one person who could beat Trump.”
Rick Wilson: ‘Fox is all back in on Trump.’ Photograph: Rick Wilson
In the words of the New York Times, at Fox Carlson created “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news – and also … the most successful”. Pursuing far-right talking points, he channelled the Republican base.
Now he has lost that platform. Wilson discounts a move to another network or a startup, like the Daily Caller Carlson co-founded in 2010, after leaving CNN and MSNBC. But to Wilson, Carlson has precious assets for any political campaign: “He has an understanding of the camera, he has an understanding of the news media, infrastructure and ecosystem. He can present. He can talk.”
Which leads Wilson to Ron DeSantis, still Trump’s closest challenger in polling, though he has not declared a run. Carlson “is unlike Ron DeSantis. He can talk to people, you know? He is the guy who can engage people on a human basis. Ron is not that guy.”
The Florida governor has fallen as Trump has surged, boosted by his own claimed martyrdom over his criminal indictment and other legal problems. DeSantis has also scored own-goals, from his fight with Disney to his failure to charm his own party, perceived personal failings prompting endorsements for Trump.
Wilson thinks DeSantis’s decision to run in a “Tucker Carlson primary”, courting the far right, may now rebound.
“DeSantis’s people had been bragging for a year. ‘Oh, we’re winning the Tucker primary. His audience loves us. We’re gonna be on Tucker.’ And it was an interesting dependency. It was an advantage that DeSantis was booked on Fox all the time and on Tucker, and mentioned on Tucker very frequently. But that has now disappeared. Fox is all back in on Trump.”
Wilson knows a thing or two about Republican fundraising. If Carlson ran, he says, he would “absolutely destroy with small donors. He would raise uncounted millions. Mega-donors would not go for it. The racial aspect of Tucker is not exactly hidden. I think that would be a disqualifier for a lot of wealthy donors. But Tucker could offset it. He would be a massive draw in that email fundraising hamster wheel.
“Remember, in 2016 the large-donor money for Trump was very late in the game. Before that, they were all with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or Chris Christie.
“I have very high confidence you’re gonna see another iteration of, you know, ‘We love you Ron, we’re never leaving you Ron,’ and then they’re gonna call him one day and say, ‘Hey, Ron, I love you, man. But you’re young. Try again next time.’ And they’ll hang up with Ron and go, ‘Mr Trump, where do I send my million dollars?’
“I’ve been to that rodeo too many times now.”
So if Carlson does enter the arena, and does buck DeSantis into the cheap seats, can he do the same to Trump?
“This iteration of Trump’s campaign is a lot smarter than the last one. I predict they would say, ‘Let’s bring Tucker in as VP and stop all this chaos, be done with it. You know, there are very few good options [for Trump] if Tucker gets in the race.”
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson? It seems outlandish.
“Again, I think the worst thing we can do is imagine the worst-case scenario can never happen. Because the worst-case scenario has happened any number of times in the last eight years.”
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#Worstcase #scenario #Rick #Wilson #Tucker #Carlson #presidential #nominee
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
The Daily Beast’s anonymous source attributed the firing, in part, to Carlson’s foul language. He allegedly used the “C word” to describe stolen election theorist Sidney Powell, and not just once. This information supposedly surfaced during discovery proceedings in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit. The Los Angeles Times relied on an anonymous source to say the firing “came straight from Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch with input from board members and other Fox Corp. executives,” and another alleging that the discrimination lawsuit filed by a recently fired producer on Carlson’s show was the cause.
At the Wall Street Journal, “people familiar with the matter” told the paper Fox was disturbed by the derogatory comments he made about the network in the Dominion documents, some of which were redacted but seen by Fox personnel. Anonymous Fox employees told Semafor they thought the discrimination suit and Carlson’s criticism of Fox executives, recorded in the court documents, had played a role. Rolling Stones’ anonymous sources spoke of an “oppo file” the network had kept on Carlson that would be used to retaliate against him if he spoke ill of Fox. The oppo file is said to contain information about workplace conduct, Carlson’s rude comments about Fox brass and colleagues, his lewd comments about women, and so on.
Surely the most fascinating anonymous tidbit appeared in Vanity Fair, where the source said that Carlson had gotten fired because Murdoch was annoyed by a messianic speech Carlson gave at the Heritage Foundation last Friday. “That stuff freaks Rupert out. He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk,” the source told the magazine. Such religious jabber, another anonymous source added in the piece, was behind the recent cancelation of Murdoch’s engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, a reputed Bible thumper who regarded Carlson as “a messenger from God.”
The comic thing about the conflicting anonymous accounts is while they seemed sure they knew why Carlson had been knocked off, Carlson himself is said to not know. How do we know that? From anonymous testimonies in New York magazine and Vanity Fair.
The journalists who were called upon to file quick turnaround stories on the canning of Carlson have our sympathies. “Why” is the most vital component of the Who, What, When, Where and Why formula behind news stories. News consumers want to know abut Carlson’s firing, but after that’s out of the way, they want to know why. An editor either instructs his reporters to find a source who can supply the why, or he allows reporters to pepper their copy with anonymous sources because it makes it look like they’ve answered the “why.”
As we see in the Carlson example, the anonymous sources — who are variously described as a “Fox news source,” “people familiar with the matter,” “a source,” “another source,” “sources,” “eight sources,” “a source briefed on the conversation,” “people familiar with the company’s thinking,” and other fuzzy IDs — don’t fundamentally agree on the reason for his ouster. Now, it could be, as NPR media reporter David Folkenflik said Wednesday on the WAMU show 1a, that the reason for Carlson’s firing is a little like the plot of Murder on the Orient Express: Everybody might be a little bit right. But the variety of early “reasons” throws doubt on the practice of relying on anonymous sources.
When anonymous sources provide documentation or other ancillary proof of their statements such as recordings, they surface information that can be verified and do readers a great service. But in many cases, they get to spout off without taking any responsibility for what they say. Readers are often given no way to judge the credibility of anonymous sources. For all we know, the “Fox news source” cited could be upper management or a spring intern. Does the source have an agenda that is coloring his blind quotations? How hard did the reporter work to verify what the anonymous source said?
In the coming days, we’re likely to learn more about the decision-making behind Carlson’s removal as named sources step up or if documents from the discrimination lawsuit and the Dominion case filter down to reporters. But until then, we can use the early Carlson reporting as a warning for readers not to overinvest in breaking news that depends so heavily on anonymice.
As the investigative journalist Edward J. Epstein once wrote, “Every source who has supplied a journalist with part of a story has selected that bit of information, whether it is true or false, for a particular purpose.” When those sources are anonymous, they can be entirely unaccountable and absolutely wrong. Read all the anonymously sourced stories you like, but be forewarned that they can be detrimental to your news health. Especially when they take a place of primacy in breaking news like the Carlson sacking.
******
Send no anonymous comments to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed is always on the record. My Mastodon and Post accounts are like a ghost town. My Substack Notes calls itself a source close to Jack Shafer. My RSS feed wants to know what it needs to do to get fired.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Asked to respond to the news that DoD officials are pleased by his departure from Fox, Carlson responded by text message: “Ha! I’m sure.” He declined to comment further.
The tension between the former cable host and Pentagon leadership isn’t new. Carlson drew the ire of top DoD officials early in the Biden administration for personal attacks on a number of military leaders, as well as ridiculing the armed forces’ efforts to increase diversity. A slew of conservative leaders quickly followed Carlson’s lead, giving rise to a small but vocal minority that to this day continues to hammer DoD officials, saying they’re focusing personnel policies at the expense of preparing for war. The Pentagon says only a small percentage of troops’ time is spent on diversity training.
Most memorably, Carlson’s remarks disparaging female service members in March 2021 prompted a rare rebuke from then-Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby.
After President Joe Biden announced new efforts to recruit and keep women in the service — including designing new body armor, updating requirements for hairstyles and the nominations of two female generals to become combatant commanders — at a White House ceremony, Carlson accused the commander in chief of making a “mockery” of the troops.
“So, we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the U.S. military,” he said.
In response, Kirby took a rare swipe at the Fox News host.
“What we absolutely won’t do is take personnel advice from a talk show host or the Chinese military,” Kirby said during a briefing with reporters, adding that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “shares the revulsion” of others who criticized Carlson’s remarks.
The comments yielded another rarity: The Pentagon’s in-house news service published an article focused entirely on the dust-up: “Press Secretary Smites Host That Dissed Diversity in U.S. Military.”
Kirby, who is now the top spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House, declined to comment for this story.
The Fox News host targeted the Air Force in particular, calling Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, then-commander of Air Education and Training Command, a “doughy moron” for updating pilot tests to address systemic racism. He also mocked Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, head of the Air Force’s recruiting office, for arguing that the service’s pilot force needs to become more diverse.
Carlson “made a mockery” of the free press and “repeatedly cherry-picked department policies and used them to destroy DoD as an institution,” said the first senior DoD official.
One general who clashed with Carlson on social media during the episode, Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe, had his retirement delayed for several months while the Army conducted a probe of the exchanges.
While several military leaders sent messages in support of women in the services without naming Carlson, Donahoe tweeted that the host “couldn’t be more wrong.” That prompted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to send a letter to Austin accusing Donahoe and other military leaders of expressing partisan views.
The saga ended in January with no action taken against Donahoe, who tweeted Monday’s news about Carlson’s exit with the message, “I have thoughts.” Donahoe declined to comment for this story.
Joe Gould contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The $787.5m settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems spared executives and on-air talent from taking the stand in a defamation lawsuit that centered on the network airing false claims of a stolen election in the weeks after Donald Trump’s 2020 loss.
The lawsuit still revealed plenty of what Fox personalities had been saying about the bogus election claims, including Tucker Carlson, the network’s top-rated host who was let go Monday. His unexplained departure has turned a spotlight on what he said in depositions, emails and text messages among the thousands of pages Dominion released in the leadup to jury selection in the case.
Carlson’s messages lambasted the news division and management, revealed how he felt about Donald Trump and demonstrated his skepticism of the election lies – so much so that Fox attorneys and company founder Rupert Murdoch held him up as part of their defense of the company. The judge who oversaw the case ruled that it was “CRYSTAL clear” none of the election claims related to Dominion was true.
Election lies
“Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson told a Fox News producer in a 16 November 2020, exchange before using expletives to describe Powell, an attorney representing Trump.
“You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon,” Carlson wrote to Powell a day later. “You’ve convinced them that Trump will win. If you don’t have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it’s a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.” There was no indication that Powell replied.
Fox attorneys noted that Carlson repeatedly questioned Powell’s claims in his broadcasts: “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” Carlson told viewers on 19 November 2020.
Carlson told his audience that he had taken Powell seriously, but that she had never provided any evidence or demonstrated that the software Dominion used siphoned votes from Trump to Biden.
Fox’s 2020 election coverage
Fox viewers were outraged when the network called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, a race call that was accurate. Fox executives and hosts began to worry about ratings as many of those viewers fled to other conservative outlets.
“We worked really hard to build what we have. Those [expletive] are destroying our credibility. It enrages me,” Carlson said in a 6 November 2020, exchange with an unidentified person.
On 8 November, after Biden was declared the winner, Carlson texted a couple of other employees: “Do the executives understand how much trust and credibility we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real.”
Later in the chain, as others bring up Newsmax as an emerging competitor, Carlson said, “With Trump behind it, an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Donald Trump
In a text exchange with an unknown person on 4 January 2021, Carlson expressed anger toward Trump. He said that “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights” and that “I truly can’t wait.”
Carlson said he had no doubt there was fraud in the 2020 election, but said Trump and his lawyers had so discredited their case – and media figures like himself – “that it’s infuriating. Absolutely enrages me.”
Addressing Trump’s four years as president, Carlson said: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
In texts early on the morning of 7 January 2021, a day after the violent assault on the US Capitol, Carlson and his longtime producer, Alex Pfeiffer, bemoaned how the rioters had believed Trump’s election lies.
“They take the president literally,” Pfeiffer said. “He is to blame for everything that happened today.”
“The problem is a little deeper than that I’d say,” Carlson replied.
Later, Carlson writes of Trump: “He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.”
Fox news department
Some of the most heated vitriol was reserved for colleagues in the news division and included conversations with fellow on-air personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity.
On 13 November, the week after the 2020 election, Ingraham, Carlson and Hannity got into a text message exchange in which they lambasted the news division. It began with Ingraham pointing out a tweet by correspondent Bryan Llenas, saying he had seen no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania.
Carlson replied that Llenas had contacted him to apologize, then added “when has he ever ‘reported’ on anything”.
Ingraham then names another colleague who indicated there was no fraud, with Hannity responding: “Guys I’ve been telling them for 4 years. News depart that breaks no news ever.” In a subsequent Twitter message seconds later, Hannity says, “They hate hate hate all three of us.”
Ingraham responds she doesn’t “want to be liked by them” and Carlson chimes in, “They’re pathetic.” The conversation continues with Hannity bemoaning the damage that has been done to the brand: “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”
Another text conversation by the trio three days later had Ingraham telling her colleagues that her anger at the news channel was “pronounced”, followed by an “lol”. In response, Carlson attacked two Fox anchors: “It should be. We devote our lives to building an audience and they let Chris Wallace and Leland [expletive] Vittert wreck it. Too much.” Wallace and Vittert have since left the network.
The three hosts then started musing about a path forward after Ingraham says they have “enormous power” and that they should think about how, together, they can force a change. Carlson’s response: “For sure. The first thing we need to do exactly what we want to do. That’s the key. Leland Vittert seems to have the authority to do whatever he wants. We should too.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Tucker Carlson, the far-right TV host whose embrace of racist conspiracy theories came to signify a shift further towards the right at Fox News, leaves behind a legacy of mainstreaming extremism after exiting the channel, and speculation is turning to any next step in an incendiary career.
The departure of Carlson, Fox News’ most-watched and highest-profile host, came as a shock. It is the second seismic moment at the news channel in a matter of days, after Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5m settlement to Dominion Voting Systems last week after airing election conspiracy theories.
Fox News announced the split in a terse statement on Monday, stating that the channel and Carlson had “agreed to part ways”. But the pithiness of the statement barely hinted at the dubious repercussions of Carlson’s seven-year tenure as a regular host: a spell in which he seemed to grow into a force that Fox News wouldn’t, or couldn’t, control.
“Tucker Carlson basically leaves a superhighway to the rightwing fever swamps,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, an organization that monitors rightwing media.
“Tucker took things from what otherwise would have been considered the fringes: Infowars [a far-right conspiracy theory website], these white nationalist communities online, he took that content and laundered it into the Fox News ecosystem, and basically built up an appetite for this amongst the Fox News audience.
“And once they sort of got a taste for blood, that’s all they wanted. That’s going to be a challenge for Fox moving forward, but what’s his legacy? His legacy is bloodthirstiness and bigotry.”
Carlson’s eponymous show, which aired at 8pm ET, averaged more than 3 million viewers a night, and was generally the most watched cable news program.
The 53-year-old might have been an unlikely hero to Fox News’ coastal-elite loathing audience. A multimillionaire who was privately educated in California, Switzerland and the Waspy environs of New England, Carlson hosted most of his shows from a specially built studio in Maine, where he spends much of the year (he also has a home in Florida).
Yet night after night, millions tuned in to watch Carlson’s furious, reddening face, under a neatly parted, country club hairstyle, as he fed viewers a daily dose of fury and victimhood and painted a dystopian picture of America.
Among Carlson’s most passionately pursued topics was the idea – contrary to all able evidence – that white people were being persecuted in the US.
Rupert Murdoch reportedly forced Carlson out in connection with a discrimination lawsuit. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
Across his tenure at Fox News, Carlson pushed the concept of the great replacement theory – which states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with people of color, in an effort to achieve political aims – in more than 400 of his shows, a New York Times analysis found.
“No singular voice in rightwing media has done more to elevate this racist conspiracy theory than Tucker,” Joy Reid, a MSNBC host, said in 2022, and his peddling of the claim brought multiple calls for him to be fired across the years, all of which Fox News ignored.
“Carlson positioned himself as the voice of the Maga base of the party and really leaned into the kinds of conspiracy theories, the white nationalist ideas that he thought would appeal to that base,” said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.
“He really was able to give a voice to this kind of grievance that Donald Trump was so good at tapping into. It was Tucker Carlson who was out there saying: ‘They’re coming for you, white people.’”
Far-right host Tucker Carlson leaves Fox News in surprise announcement – video report
Fox News gave no indication as to the reason for splitting with Carlson, but on Monday the Los Angeles Times reported that Rupert Murdoch, the omnipotent chairman of Fox Corporation – the parent company of Fox News – had forced Carlson out of the news channel in relation to a looming discrimination lawsuit.
Another thing that may not have helped were the embarrassing disclosures of Carlson’s text messages and emails, published as part of the Dominion lawsuit. Those messages revealed that privately Carlson held very different views from those he espoused on air, including about Donald Trump.
“I hate him passionately,” Carlson said of the former president, describing Trump’s behavior in the weeks following the 2020 election as “disgusting”.
In another text, Carlson said of “the last four years” under Trump: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
It is difficult to say what comes next for Carlson. Newsmax and One America News Network, two other rightwing cable news channels, could be possible homes, but they have a much smaller audience, and would probably be unable to match Fox News’ salary.
“I don’t think he goes to a competing cable network,” Carusone said.
“He’s too sensitive to ratings and that would be an embarrassment – they could never match the ratings, they could never give him the reach.”
One thing that is likely, however, is that Carlson “attacks Fox”, Carusone said.
“He wasn’t shy about attacking his colleagues and management when he was at a company – he’s certainly not going to be shy about attacking them now,” Carusone said.
The idea of an aggressive response is “tightly tied into his brand”, Carusone said “And he’s also just a venomous, spiteful guy, so the reflex will be to take a shot.”
Carlson’s unexpected departure meant he had no opportunity to say goodbye to his viewers. On Friday, in what turned out to be his last show, he had once more voiced that issue which is so close to his heart: the great replacement theory.
“The defining strategic insight of the modern Democratic party is they don’t really need to convince anyone of anything,” Carlson said in his monologue on Friday’s show.
“What matters is demographics. To import enough people from elsewhere, people who are financially dependent on you in order to live.”
Perhaps Carlson can take some comfort in knowing that his persona on Fox died as he lived: sitting in a TV studio, looking upset, and pushing a racist conspiracy theory to an increasingly rabid rightwing audience.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
