‘Tucker for president?’ What Carlson does next, now he’s been outfoxed

The defenestration of Fox News host Tucker Carlson – star of the most-watched show in cable news and the most influentially toxic talk-show host in America – demonstrates that the fallout from Fox News’ historic $US787.5 million ($1.2 billion) defamation payout last week is not over.

The money went to a voting machine company that had become caught up in the big election lies promulgated by Donald Trump, his ragtag band of legal conspirators, and Fox News itself, which invited the conspirators time and time again onto its channel, allowing them to spin lies about the election.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson described Donald Trump as a “demonic force”.Credit: Getty

Responsibility for all this, logically, would fall on Fox News chief executive Lachlan Murdoch, and his dad/boss Rupert Murdoch. But the Murdochs are always willing to part with a little money (and the people who helped them make that money) when they have a scrape they need to get out of. Most significantly, Carlson’s firing shows that the Murdochs are moving to do something they should have done a long time ago – take back control of the network from a slate of show hosts who had clearly taken it off the rails.

The trouble goes back to the era of the architect of the network, Roger Ailes, who was feared by all who worked there. But it turned out he sexually harassed his female underlings in his spare time, and was fired – with an eight-figure payout.

The Murdochs put a functionary named Suzanne Scott into the chief executive position. Scott didn’t have Ailes’ flair for control, and soon a trio of star hosts – Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham – began to run amok, as did lesser lights. Fast-forward and Fox ended up losing more than three-quarters of a billion dollars in a defamation settlement.

Carlson began as a not-untalented reporter from the right – fairly unusual in American journalism – and eventually graduated to something like the big time, with features in The New York Times Magazine. He ended up as a co-host of a latter-day version of CNN’s right-left talk show Crossfire. Under Carlson and co-host Bill Press, the program degraded – until Jon Stewart appeared on the show and gave them a now-legendary dressing-down.

Carlson drifted, started a right-wing news site and then finally found a home on Fox. He became a phenomenon during the Trump era and after.

Carlson was an unmistakable figure, with something of a schoolboy mien even into his 50s, sporting his trademark bow tie and curdled expression of disgust – the latter always directed at the array of outrageous doings he saw coming from the left in America.

He was known for furious racist tirades about immigrants; he was a major proponent of a chimerical idea that there is a plan to “replace” what in Fox-world was known as “legacy Americans” with immigrants from Central America and the Middle East. Note that he was not decrying immigration per se, which is always a factor in American life, but articulating a sinister plan afoot to destroy the USA.

After the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Carlson argued that it had been orchestrated by the left as part of “an actual war, soldiers and paramilitary agencies hunting down American citizens”. Yet Carlson has also tried to portray the attack as peaceful, using selectively chosen video from the Capitol that day. None of this made sense: so it was a false flag operation designed to demonise the right – but it was also peaceful?

Signs of his early career as a principled reporter appeared once in a while. Early in the pandemic he went to visit then-president Trump to warn him that the coronavirus epidemic needed to be taken more seriously. But, soon after, he reverted to using conspiracy theories about vaccines and lockdowns as a political wedge issue, and became a key contributor to the country’s mishandling of the outbreak, and its tragic death toll.

Tucker Carlson and former US president Donald Trump in 2022.Credit: AP

Similarly, early on in Trump’s various schemes to undermine confidence in the 2020 election, he actually called out on air one of Trump’s henchpeople, attorney Sidney Powell, for not providing the evidence she promised about election fraud. But this, too, fell by the wayside and Carlson fell back into line, even as he disparaged Trump (“I hate him passionately”) and Powell (“a bitch”, “a c---“) behind the scenes.

Carlson will now go back to his website, The Daily Caller, which as of early Tuesday morning in Australia had nine stories about him on its front page (“Tucker for president? Speculation Mounts after Fox News Exit”). Carlson has indeed been named as a potential presidential candidate, but this seems silly given his views on minorities, women, gays and the transgendered, which he articulates with much more force and unpleasantness than the shambling Trump.

Other dismissed Fox stars – Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck ... the Tucker Carlsons of their day – have remained as mid-level celebrities in the second-string right-wing mediasphere, while Fox News, of course, has rolled on. Carlson’s ouster seems like merely the first step as the Murdochs, again, are faced with cleaning up a mess of their own making.

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