Fox hosts change, the toxic message doesn’t
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News media in the United States remain somewhat obsessed with finding the reasons behind the firing of Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Reporters are still unearthing troves of texts and emails, tracking down current and former Fox employees, all in the hopes of explaining the sudden and unexpected derailment of arguably the most viral, and vile, news media personality on the planet.
The theories abound.
Mr. Carlson’s firing was no doubt partly tied to the historic US$787.5-million defamation settlement Fox reached with Dominion Voting Systems, and the fact another multi-billion-dollar civil defamation suit is still pending. Mr. Carlson was as guilty as any within the Fox News stable of promoting demonstrably false theories of electoral fraud in a desperate bid to keep former president Donald Trump in power.
Mr. Carlson was as guilty as any within the Fox News stable of promoting demonstrably false theories of electoral fraud in a desperate bid to keep former president Donald Trump in power.
The Dominion suit produced volumes of testimony and correspondence showing clearly that Fox news personalities, including Mr. Carlson, knowingly lied on air and fabricated stories to pursue a political agenda and expand their audience. The texts also showed Mr. Carlson lashing out at a host of newsmakers and co-workers using the most profane language imaginable.
There is also the matter of a civil suit filed by one of Mr. Carlson’s former staffers, alleging she was forced to work in a hostile and discriminatory work environment. Other Fox personalities have been fired for similar allegations.
But could all that add up to a decision to oust Mr. Carlson, the network’s resident audience rainmaker?
Richard Drew / The Associated Press files Tucker Carlson recently lost his prominent Fox News hosting job.
The most recent straw to be added to this wobbly camel’s back was yet another text message Mr. Carlson sent to a Fox producer on the day after the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. In it, Mr. Carlson describes the emotional tug-of-war he experienced while watching scenes of the rioting on Capitol Hill. In particular, he related a moment in which he watched as a bunch of “Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living sh-t out of him.”
Mr. Carlson quickly acknowledged the “three against one” confrontation was “dishonorable obviously.” But then, he offered this observation.
“It’s not how white men fight.”
Of all the things that Mr. Carlson has said on air, or in his correspondence, there is something about this comment — contained in what he thought was a private communication — that transcends terms like shocking and offensive. As New York Times columnist A.O. Scott noted, it represents a horrifyingly ironic post-script to Mr. Carlson’s career.
“A glance at American history — taking in night riders, lynch mobs, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and the killings of Michael Griffith and Yusef Hawkins in New York in the 1980s, to say nothing of Jan. 6 itself — suggests that this is exactly how white men fight. Not all white men, of course, and not only white men, but white men precisely when they perceive the symbolic and material prerogatives of their whiteness to be under attack.”
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However, even the “how white men fight” trope does not seem to fully explain Mr. Carlson’s firing. And to be honest, any definitive explanation will ultimately be disappointing because of one sobering truth: a Tucker-less Fox remains entrenched in the same ideas its now-former host espoused.
In the week following Mr. Carlson’s departure, Fox host Laura Ingraham continued the network’s toxic attack on immigration, employing the lexicon of the white nationalist movement. “American citizens see that Biden’s team isn’t focused on raising their standard of living. Instead, the Biden team is focused on remaking the country where illegal immigrant Dreamers are valued over native-born Americans.”
It seems that while Mr. Carlson may be gone, the ideas he worked tirelessly to promote have not been forgotten at Fox News.
