5 big(ish) thoughts on Tucker Carlson's firing
What It All Means.
The surprise firing of Tucker Carlson from Fox News on Monday got me to thinking. And thinking. And thinking.
Below, 5 thoughts I had on it — in no particular order other than the one in which they occurred to me.
It’s the money, stupid
The famed TV producer Don Ohlmeyer had a famous line that just kept running through my head yesterday: “The answer to all of your questions is money.”
The firing of Tucker is, at root, best understood as a reflection of that reality. The Murdoch family, who owns Fox, made the calculation that Carlson was costing them more money — whether through the recent Dominion settlement or advertisers fleeing his show — than he was making them.
Which is something! Because Carlson was regularly pulling in more than 3 million viewers for his show — the highest-rated program on the network — and presumably raking in cash for the company.
But it appears at least that the value proposition of Carlson flipped for Fox News sometime recently. He went from an asset to a liability — and they canned him.
Murdoch and his minions wanted to retake control of the network.
One of the major changes in journalism — and especially cable TV — over the past 10-15 years is that content creators seized power and control.
That was a major change from the days when NO ONE was bigger than the brand and nothing was more important than protecting the brand.
Carlson, arguably, had transcended Fox News. He was its face, yes, but also a sort of independent operator — saying and doing whatever he wanted in public and private. (The Dominion documents make that abundantly clear; Carlson felt no constraint attacking his co workers and even his bosses.)
His firing then was an Empire-Strikes-Back sort of moment. The leaders of the cable world wanted to reassert their control over the network. And what better way to do that than to get rid of its ratings whale? If you are willing to fire Tucker Carlson, is there anyone at Fox you won’t fire?
Carlson’s transformation was stunning.
I remember — back in the late 1990s — when I was just starting out in journalism that Carlson was seen as a hot voice of the young conservative establishment. He wore bow ties! His name was Tucker! He wrote for Talk magazine!
In a 1999 profile about him in the Washington Post — written by his future Fox colleague Howard Kurtz — Carlson is described thusly:
A combative, bow-tied conservative who just turned 30, Carlson seems to have raced up the Washington punditry ladder without breaking a sweat. He is a four-year veteran of the Weekly Standard, a regular panelist on CNN and now the chief political writer for Brown's much-hyped new magazine. He ranges widely on the journalistic keyboard, from high-concept ridicule of global warming to the first down-and-dirty interview with Monica Lewinsky's sex therapist.
Carlson had — at that point — all the markings of a long career as a (mostly) establishment pundit.
To go from that to where he ended — a burr in the Republican saddle on, well, everything — is pretty remarkable. Or to use another word: Unimaginable.
Is Fox News trying to change its stripes?
Look, I don’t think FNC is going to abandon its conservative, er, leanings just because they got rid of Tucker. Fox’s positioning in the media landscape makes them a lot of money. And, per point #1 above, that’s the central (and maybe only) calculation Fox was making with its decision to remove Tucker.
But that it came from the top — the Los Angeles Times reported that Rupert Murdoch himself had initiated and approved of the move — is meaningful. Because it tells us that the head of the network made a calibrated decision to oust not just his highest-rated anchor but the anchor that is most closely associated with former President Donald Trump.
“I was shocked. I’m surprised,” Trump told Newsmax of Carlson’s firing. “He’s a very good person a very good man and very talented and he had very high ratings. He’s been terrific especially over the last year or so he’s been terrific to me.”
Antagonizing Trump may be the point here. The former president has been increasingly critical of Fox News for its alleged lack of devotion to him and his 2024 campaign. Murdoch may have seen removing Carlson as a way to fire back at Trump — and maybe buy the network some (more) distance from the billionaire businessman.
Tucker is done in cable. But…
Having been fired now from Fox, CNN and MSNBC, it would seem as though Carlson’s days in cable are over.
While he could join the ultra-conservative outlets like One America News or Newsmax, those channels have a fraction of the audience that Fox (or MSNBC or CNN) have and I would think would be hard pressed to pay Carlson anything close to what he was making at Fox.
That doesn’t mean that Carlson is done as an influencer in Republican circles., however. The growth of the creator economy — from things like Substack to YouTube to the panoply of media sites that have cropped up on the online right — means that Carlson, who is among the best known media personalities in the country, could immediately have a platform and a voice.
My guess is he takes some time off but that we haven’t heard the last of Carlson as a voice in the political debate in this country.
Cristo,
I will be on the road for the next week, so I want to put forth my "Mailbag" question now.
On what planet are the "journalists" speculating that the Swanson Dinner Guy could be either a viable VP candidate for the Defendant-In-Chief, or would go against him as a GOP candidate???
Put aside that he has been sacked by the three major cable outlets (not good resume items) and that his beliefs are antithetical to sentient voters, but just listening to his voice and forced cackle makes one yearn for Wannabe Mussolini's reading of "The Art of The Deal".
He'd fit in very well on Russia Today.
That, or as a "free agent rabble rouser", a la Dan Bongino or Alex Jones.