Tucker could challenge the election without losing his job. Even as Dominion was threatening Fox with a record-breaking lawsuit, Tucker retained his primetime slot. It was only when he gave a speech that spoke ill of big pharma and that contained a religious message that he finally lost his job. How else can we explain both the timing of his dismissal and sheer insanity of it: Tucker was Fox News. To refer to him as their star is an understatement. He was a juggernaut. Rupert Murdoch may have thought he was just another Bill O’Reilly and that America would would soon forget him. However, Tucker Carlson is much more talented than Bill O’Reilly—his monologues themselves became news. More importantly, Bill O’Reilly was fired before the podcasting revolution. Tucker can become a competitor to Fox in a way Bill O’Reilly never could.
AOC once appeared on Jen Psaki’s show calling for Tucker’s termination, claiming that he “clearly is inciting people to violence.” This talking point, of course, ignores all the jurisprudence surrounding incitement. The Supreme Court established a very straightforward two-pronged test: 1) Something must call for direct, illegal action. 2) The speech in question must have a reasonable probability of producing that action. Despite his thousands of hours on television, nothing Tucker Carlson has said has ever been tied to a crime. In what way then can his speech, which does not even satisfy the first prong of this test, be said to satisfy the second? When has Tucker ever called for violent, illegal action? You can rest assured that if such a soundbite existed, the media would be playing it over and over again. It is curious that this woman, whose every thought is either moronic or provided to her by one of her handlers (or both, to be fair), decided to emphasize this topic so close to Tucker’s dismissal. Why, exactly, was he even being discussed?
There are those who claim that Tucker is being fired because of the Dominion case. However, firing Tucker because of the Dominion lawsuit makes no sense. First, Tucker did not push the election fraud narrative on his show: It was not his reporting that made Fox susceptible to this lawsuit. Second, that lawsuit is already a sunk cost. It should not play into your future economic calculations even if you attributed the lawsuit to Tucker—which would involve some very strange thinking on Rupert Murdoch’s part. Dominion’s lawyers have denied that Tucker’s dismissal was a part of their settlement, and Fox was promoting his show the very morning he was fired. Whatever happened, it was sudden. What we do know is this: The fact that Tucker was dismissed so quickly without any kind of contract negotiation intended to increase Fox’s editorial control, suggests this was not a purely economic decision.
Those few on the left who think that Fox will “recoup some of these costs by firing Tucker” demonstrate their incapacity for business: Tucker makes Fox money. This move is not saving Fox money; it is costing them money. Their ratings are bound to suffer, and Tucker’s contract almost certainly requires he be paid some kind of severance: Fox will have to pay off this severance while paying their new star a salary. It is very unlikely Fox will come out of this more profitable—as is demonstrated to the hit they took to their stock price (which would have gone up if this were a sound move that would “save them money.”)
I believe that the content of his April 19th speech likely caused his dismissal. This means that Fox has some economic ties to big pharma. My guess is that pharma must have threatened to reduce their advertising spending on Fox.
Pharmaceutical advertising has always had an unusual character to it: The advertisements often leave you wondering what exactly the drug does—and they lack the catchiness and impressiveness of other advertising campaigns. One has to wonder how often a patient really talks their doctor into giving them a new drug over the one they were otherwise planning to prescribe: No, doctor, I don’t want that—I want this other drug that will cost me three times as much. While many disagree with this premise, these ads seem to work more like indirect bribes to influence news departments and editorial coverage than real marketing.
Rupert Murdoch canceled his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith because she held religious beliefs—including a belief that Tucker Carlson has a God-given mission. The speech describes how modern political conflicts have started to disagree about what ends we should be looking to achieve rather than means about how to achieve agreed-upon ends: That our disagreements have become fundamental disagreements about values. He claimed that these disagreements resemble a theological conflict more than a traditional political one. His Manichean overtones likely freaked Murdoch out, even though the fundamental point remains entirely valid. We no longer share the same values: I would not describe this using religious language the way Tucker did, but I agree with the observation.
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Here, meanwhile, is the speech. Watch it and think about whether it may have played a role in his dismissal.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/tucker-carlson-reportedly-taken-off-air-by-rupert-murdoch-for-overtly-religious-remarks/ar-AA1amyom
Story time: I once saw Tucker Carlson in person; back in 2007, he was doing a story on the St. John's campus. A friend of mine and I attempted to approach him in order to ask for an autograph, and he said on his cell to a producer, "We have two tabocca users (or abusers, it was unclear) headed this way." That convinced me and my friend to keep walking.