It took paying out a settlement for $787 million dollars and a host of damaging private messages, but Fox News finally did the right thing and fired their most popular TV host, Tucker Carlson. While there are any number of good reasons why Carlson should have been fired in the past few years, from his racist, xenophobic comments (he once said that immigrants make America "dirtier") to his crazy, seemingly contradictory conspiracy theories (he recently edited footage of the January 6th riot to make it look the protestors were peaceful, this after previously implying that the whole thing was a false flag operation by the FBI!), to one of his top writers being fired for posting racist, sexist and homophobic comments for years online under a pseudonym, Carlson clearly played up to white supremacist ideas without actually endorsing white supremacist groups, who got the message and flocked to his show.
He's not the first Fox News on air personality to be suddenly fired; Bill O'Reilly, who, like Carlson, was the host on the network with the highest ratings, was forced out in 2017 because of a large payment made by the network to women he had sexually harassed. Glenn Beck, another popular host, was let go in 2015 after he called then President Barack Obama a "racist" and once joked about poisoning Nancy Pelosi.
Still, Carlson's firing was sudden, given that he wasn't even given a chance to say goodbye on his show. Now I wish that his firing was in reaction to his horrible comments, or the allegedly misogynistic work environment that fostered on the show, but it really sounds like the breaking point was that, during the recent legal case that Fox was in with the Dominion voting machine company, private messages of Carlson's were revealed to his bosses that showed a lack of respect for Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and other network leaders. Carlson clearly thought that, as the number one host on the network, he could express negative views about his bosses to his coworkers without risk. Obviously, he was wrong. I think his mistake was assuming that conservative audiences cared more about personalities than content. Carlson was the number one host on Fox News because he was the one who pushed his hateful rhetoric to the brink of acceptability. (The New York Times ran a heavily researched study of his show in April of 2022 that revealed that many of his stories got their start in white supremacist chat rooms). Who he was didn't really matter to the viewers, it was what he said.
Now while I would love nothing more than for Fox News to change its tone and do more actual reporting and less crazy commentary about the dangers of "woke" M and M's, I'm not getting my hopes up. Yes, I'm happy that Carlson got the boot, just as I was happy when O'Reilly and Beck did too, but did those two earlier firings change the nature of Fox News? No. The simple truth of right wing media is that there will always be someone who will tell their mostly white, mostly old and mostly male audience what they want to hear along with conspiracy theories and ideas that will make them mad, even when those ideas don't make sense. (A right wing relative of mine once assured me that the Green New Deal would have banned airplanes!). In other words, Carlson may be gone, but the sexism, bigotry, homophobia and xenophobia he spewed can always be spewed by somebody else.
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