Tucker Carlson, the most famous news anchor on American television, as well as one of the most lying and ultra-conservative, is leaving Fox. And it does so just a week after Rupert Murdoch’s chain agreed to pay $787.5 million to the vote counting company Dominion Voting Systems for falsely accusing it of participating in the same bogus election fraud alleged by Donald Trump after losing the 2020 presidential race against Joe Biden.
The lawsuit, in which Carlson featured prominently, exposed the top brass and top figures at the nation’s most-watched cable news channel. During the protracted pretrial phase of Dominion’s defamation suit, the release of thousands of internal emails between Fox executives and anchors showed, for example, how nearly all of them mocked Trump’s lies while they were trying to mislead the audience by defending the veracity of their accusations of fraud.
In one of the messages, Carlson revealed his “passionate hatred” towards the former president while on the air he continued to praise him and ignore that he was lying; in others, the presenter asked Fox executives to immediately stop a reporter from the channel who was trying to tell the truth.
Yesterday the chain announced the departure of Carlson, 53 years old. “Fox News and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and before that as a collaborator”, said the medium in a statement. And he clarified that the last broadcast of his eight o’clock program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, was last Friday.
So no goodbyes, a fact that invites us to think about an abrupt breakup and not as friendly as one might expect after 7 years as a star of the channel. In addition, and according to The New York Times, Carlson did not receive any prior notice of his departure. “The host learned of the decision on Monday morning,” and his executive producer, Justin Wells, was also out of a job.
While the details of the breakup are not known, part of the explanation could be the criticism Carlson leveled at Fox executives when he complained about those within their news services trying to combat the Trump charade. “Do the executives understand the credibility we have lost with our audience?†he wrote to a colleague a day after the network had recognized Biden’s victory. That decision cost the channel a loss of viewers. Then, to slow the fall, Murdoch’s company rectified and subscribed to the fraud theory; that is, he proved his star right. But amid the uproar Carlson said in other emails: “Those f—–s (bastards) are destroying our credibility (…) What we have here is a combination of incompetent liberals and senior leaders with too much pride to back down.”
It is not certain that it is these widely publicized complaints that have cost the job of the big media hammer of Democrats, anti-racists, defenders of the rights of the LGBTI community and progressives in general, whom he, like Trump, describes as followers of Stalin.
Some media point to the complaint filed against him by former Fox producer Abby Grossberg as the reason for Carlson’s departure, accusing him of creating a “misogynistic and discriminatory” work environment.
It also remains to be seen what the presenter’s plans are, since no one doubts his power as the media apostle of the US far-right.
Carlson is leaving Fox, but his message continues to resonate.
