The stunning firing of Tucker Carlson at Fox News has silenced one of the most powerful conservative voices in America setting off a cataclysm of jubilant jeering in the media, speculation on the real reasons for it, and the future of Fox News.
The latest buzz is whether Maria Bartiromo and Judge Jeanne Pirro may be next to get the ax. The fallout continues over Fox’s agreement to pay $787.5 million to settle the $1.6 billion lawsuit brought against it by Dominion Voting Systems, and my view is Maria deserves to survive this.
This writer hopes she does.
Tucker Carlson's ouster is downright rude; it had to hurt, as I mentioned on Rita Cosby’s show on Saturday morning on Newsmax TV, here.
One clear winner in this Tucker trauma has emerged, says veteran political advisor Dick Morris, whom I joined in a Newsmax segment on Monday of last week.
Morris declared:
"The obvious fact is that Newsmax has won. Newsmax is now the sole conservative voice in media, and Fox News can talk about that, but by firing Carlson they have decidedly moved to the left and the center."
He added, "I think ratings are going to increase dramatically, I think that people that are used to watching Fox are going to flock to Newsmax."
Good call.
Newsmax ratings were up 261% in the 8 p.m. slot, up 220% in prime time over all, and up 113% for total day, for Monday to Wednesday last week, compared with the two previous weeks. I discussed this with anchors Lidia Curanaj and Michael Grimm on Sunday morning on Newsmax's "Wake Up America Weekend."
The Fox shift away from the right has been happening for a while under Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s prodigal son, Lachlan Murdoch. He is less conservative than his father (and less willing to be a pariah with his wife in New York high society.)
After the Republican "red trickle" in the 2022 midterms, all three Murdoch-controlled media pillars (Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post), came down on Trump especially hard, as I wrote last November. As Vanity Fair described it: "Rupert Murdoch Knees Trump in the Balls While He’s Doubled Over Coughing Up Blood."
Carlson’s sudden exit follows the departure of conservative Saturday show host Dan Bongino the previous week.
While Bongino said Fox News offered him the chance to do a farewell show and he declined, Tucker Carlson was given no such courtesy, despite his reported $20 million salary to anchor a nightly program that raked in more than $75 million a year in ads.
This is the way it works in TV news, or at Fox, at least. It is like being the target of a mob hit: two in the hat, before you have any idea you are already gone.
When I left Fox in 2014, I was told the news after I had just finished co-anchoring the daily noon show. "Today was your last day on the Fox Business Network. There’s no room for you in the new lineup," the network president told me, and a security guard escorted me out 15 minutes later
The monumental decision to fire Tucker was made over a frantic weekend, amid concerns, perhaps, that the star anchor could no longer be controlled, or no longer was worth the risk of keeping him on. The New York Post’s former Media Ink columnist, Keith Kelly, discusses this on my podcast "What's Bugging Me" on Ricochet.
He was fearless in taking on controversial topics that offended many on the left, railing against open borders and illegal immigrants, COVID-19 vaccines, and the radical trans agenda.
In addition to the Dominion lawsuit, Carlson is named in a lawsuit filed in March by a woman who worked as chief booker for his show and alleges a hostile work environment.
The clincher may have come on Tucker’s penultimate show on Thursday night last week, when he called out the mainstream media for taking "hundreds of millions of dollars from Big Pharma companies, and then they shilled for their sketchy products on the air."
He invited viewers to imagine that the Trump administration made purchases of pillows from MyPillow, a major Fox sponsor, mandatory as a COVID-19 treatment, and that Fox News attacked those who refused "even as evidence mounted that MyPillow caused heart attacks, fertility problems, and death."
This is an ill-advised way for an anchor to invoke the brand of a loyal sponsor. Carlson went on: "If Fox News did that, what would you think of Fox News? Would you trust us? Of course you wouldn’t, you would know that we were liars."
And then Tucker Carlson added: "Thank heaven Fox News never did anything like that, but the other channels did."
He was a little late to that one.
(A related article may be found here.)
Dennis Kneale is a writer and media strategist in New York and host of the podcast, "What's Bugging Me." Previously, he was an anchor at CNBC and at Fox Business Network, after serving as a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal and managing editor of Forbes. Read Dennis Kneale's reports — More Here.
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