Tucker Carlson: the ‘ratings juggernaut’ sacked from Fox News

The sudden sacking of Tucker Carlson has left a void at the heart of the Republican media landscape, just as the contest to secure the party’s presidential nomination for 2024 hots up.

The “seismic” revelation that Fox News had fired its most popular host, without even giving him airtime to say farewell to his millions of devoted viewers, has “rocked both the media and political worlds”, said CNN, with fundamental questions yet to be answered.

The “stunning departure” of the “ratings juggernaut” was announced on Monday with no explanation, said the Los Angeles Times, but the newspaper’s sources said the decision “came straight from Fox Corp”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A series of lawsuits that revealed, among other things, his true feelings about Donald Trump precipitated the exit of the one-time Republican kingmaker.

Who is Tucker Carlson?

Born in 1969 in San Francisco – “as the excesses of the Sixties peaked and the conservative backlash to the counterculture and the Civil Rights movement started to take shape” – Carlson was politically engaged from a young age. As a student he “had a reputation as a gleeful contrarian – an indefatigable debater and verbal jouster who, according to some, could also be a bit of a jerk”, said Insider.

Beginning his media career in the 1990s, he shot to national prominence co-hosting CNN’s prime-time news debate programme Crossfire from 2001 to 2005, followed by the nightly programme Tucker on MSNBC from 2005 to 2008. It was at Fox News, however, that he established himself as “the right’s avatar of grievance, the conductor of its orchestral whine about America’s tumble into cultural decadence, its principal hero in a fairy-tale battle against the dark magic of the Very Woke”, reported NBC News.

Carlson had, until last Friday, hosted the most watched cable news shows in the country built on the back of a loyal following by pushing conspiracy theories and stoking the culture wars.

Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic said Carlson “squandered his considerable God-given talent for scrupulously true commentary, opting instead for clickbait at The Daily Caller or dumbed-down demagoguery at Fox”.

Legal issues

His incendiary rhetoric and confrontational style led The New York Times to say that Tucker Carlson Tonight “may be the most racist show in the history of cable news”.

Yet it was “not something Carlson said that may have spelled his end at Fox News – or at least, no one thing in particular”, said Josh Marcus for The Independent. Instead, “a pair of lawsuits challenged the institution as a whole on how it treated its own employees and how it treated the truth itself”.

Vanity Fair suggested that the revelations from Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News, which the network settled last week for $787.5m, “were embarrassing for many individuals, including Carlson,” but what really concerned Fox bosses was “a huge number of other pages that remain out of public view”.

“The redactions were voluminous. Only three groups of people know what those pages contain: Dominion’s lawyers, Fox’s top executives, and obviously the people who were sending and receiving the messages,” said the magazine.

This begs the question, “what was Carlson saying about, say, Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott? What was he texting about the Murdochs? We don’t know. We may never know. But this theory may explain why Carlson’s top producer and textmate, Justin Wells, was also terminated”, suggested Vanity Fair.

A rare ability to fail upward

The Dominion suit was “just the beginning though”, said The Independent’s Marcus. On 20 March, Abby Grossberg, a former producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight filed a federal lawsuit against Fox, alleging a “toxic workplace” where “truth remains a fugitive” and the overriding culture is one of “poisonous and entrenched patriarchy”.

“We are unable to say definitively, for now, what led to the firing of one of the most powerful figures in modern American media and politics”, said CNN’s Oliver Darcy, although “one veteran television news executive told me that they believed the decision came down to a straightforward calculation by the Murdochs: risk versus reward.”

Not only does Carlson carry “legal baggage”, he “regularly births negative news cycles about the network that tarnish the brand”, Darcy added. Meanwhile, mainstream advertisers have “stayed far away from Carlson’s show, which is far too toxic to associate with”.

The fired anchor re-emerged on Twitter last night with a “two-minute broadside against US media and politics”, said Bloomberg. He “steered away from any mention of Fox News or his ousting”, but claimed the big topics were not being debated on national television due to political parties and their donors. After taking what he called a “little time off” in recent days, he said he had noticed “how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are”.

Bloomberg added that conservative channels Newsmax and One America News Network were “among names that have publicly indicated they are wooing him”.

“Where he – or Fox News for that matter – lands next after this season of upheaval is unclear,” concluded Marcus. “One thing is for certain though: Carlson has a rare ability to fail upward”.