by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:
He Tucked around and found out.
Tucker Carlson, the biggest star in cable news history, found out he no longer had a job at FOX News on Monday, reportedly only ten minutes before the rest of the world got the news. His show Tucker Carlson Tonight ran from 2016 to 2023 and was the highest-rated cable news show ever, at times averaging over five million viewers.
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Carlson, who TIME magazine said in 2021 “may be the most powerful conservative in America,” closed his show on Friday promising viewers he’d be back on Monday, but by Monday he was gone. He wasn’t even given an opportunity to bid his viewers a fond farewell, which one critic called “the television equivalent of an execution.”
Some sources say FOX’s top dog Rupert Murdoch fired him. Others say the decision came from Murdoch’s son Lachlan and Suzanne Scott, FOX’s dead-faced affirmative-action gender-equity-hire CEO. Carlson’s replacement has yet to be named. For now, FOX is using a rotating series of talking stiffs to fill the vacuum left by his absence.
Neither Carlson nor FOX have commented on the specific reasons for his axing, so for now it’s all speculative.
Some suggest he became the fall guy for the fact that last week, FOX News settled a lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems had filed against them for $787.5 million. Two days after the 2020 presidential election, possibly suggesting that FOX’s executives saw a financial incentive in supporting Trump’s claims of election fraud, Carlson texted a producer:
We worked really hard to build what we have. Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me. . . . What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.
In the weeks following the election, when FOX’s management was attempting to appease Trump’s base by alleging that Dominion was involved in undermining the results, Carlson was their lone voice crying out that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell had failed to provide evidence of her claims. On November 19, 2020, Carlson told viewers, “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
As part of discovery in the case, it was revealed that Carlson had messaged Powell by saying:
You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon. 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.
He privately texted FOX host Laura Ingraham:
Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane. . . . Our viewers are good people and they believe it.
Although Carlson was FOX News’ biggest human asset, he was hardly a company man. Some theorize that although he might have been the only honest person at the network regarding the fact that Sidney Powell wasn’t coughing up any evidence for her claims about Dominion Voting Systems, FOX executives and their bruised egos placed all the blame on Carlson for having to fork over nearly a billion dollars in damages for pushing that narrative.
It’s been rumored that Rupert Murdoch was displeased with Carlson’s coverage of whatever you want to call what happened at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a friend of Murdoch’s, has publicly stated that Carlson has drawn “offensive and misleading conclusions” about January 6. At various times, Carlson has suggested the event was a federal setup and that Ray Epps was an FBI plant. Earlier this year, he aired footage provided to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that undermined the Biden Administration and FBI’s insistence that the event was a strictly violent white-supremacist terrorist insurrection.
