Editorials & Other Articles

marmar

(79,865 posts) Fri Apr 28, 2023, 09:02 AM Apr 2023

"Disinformation can come at a cost": What Fox News learned from Tucker Carlson

"Disinformation can come at a cost": What Fox News learned from Tucker Carlson
"But it's not clear that Fox will abandon its business model of feeding on division and extremism"

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Senior Writer
PUBLISHED APRIL 28, 2023 6:15AM (EDT)

(Salon) On Monday, Tucker Carlson was suddenly and quite unceremoniously fired by Fox "News". To say that Carlson was not "fired well" is an understatement: he was dumped without having the customary opportunity to even say a proper goodbye to his many millions of loyal fans and devotees.

There continue to be rumors and much speculation about why Fox "News" removed Tucker Carlson. These include that the Dominion lawsuit and settlement for defamation in connection to the Big Lie about the 2020 Election and the Jan. 6 coup attempt (including a pending lawsuit from the voting technology company Smartmatic) made Tucker Carlson an expensive liability.

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Matthew Sheffield is the founder of the progressive media platform Flux and host of the Theory of Change podcast.

At this juncture, the complete rationale behind Tucker Carlson's sudden departure from Fox Corporation remains unknown. But given the reporting thus far and the fact that Carlson himself promised to be back on Monday, it is a virtual certitude that he was fired.

Carlson's exit from Fox's most-coveted 8pm ET time slot is unquestionably a good thing for America. His nightly program was the number-one media vector in the radicalization of the Republican Party that has taken place in recent years. Many racist activists and conspiracy theorists have admitted this, including former KKK leader David [Duke] who has hailed Carlson for proclaiming malicious and debunked claims that unspecified "elites" are trying to replace native-born Americans with "more obedient voters." Carlson's program also was known for airing numerous interviews with extremist activists who no one else at Fox was willing to promote.

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Steven Beschloss is a journalist and author of several books, including "The Gunman and His Mother."

Tucker Carlson may have said privately that he hates Trump "passionately," but that never stopped him from regularly pushing Trumpist lies of election fraud and minimizing the violent reality of Jan. 6. Nor did he hesitate to serve as a pro-Putin apologist feeding his audience Kremlin talking points to doubt the legitimacy of Ukraine and its democracy. But what especially distinguished Carlson as a dangerously ugly and racist force in the Fox universe was his white supremacist message of a "great replacement" by immigrants and other people of color who make the country "poorer and dirtier" and endanger the power of the shrinking white population.

In a sane world, where a news organization embraces its duty to tell the truth, Fox and its owner Rupert Murdoch would have reined in Carlson for any of these lies and conspiratorial ideas that enhanced his demagogic appeal to nightly viewers and expanded his utility to the far right. But we may soon learn that none of this was the reason Murdoch fired him—that it was his offensive and possibly illegal off-camera behavior that bothered his bosses—which bodes poorly for the possibility that Fox "News" will change its tune and act more responsibly. Sadly, I have little confidence that whoever comes next will help put an end to the malevolent, divisive role Fox plays in American life. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2023/04/28/experts-react-to-tucker-carlson-firing/