(Dobbs) When It's Even An Embarrassment For Fox
Tucker Carlson rose fast. He dropped even faster.
Remember Bill O’Reilly?
Yeah, that’s my point. In his prime, he was the Tucker Carlson of Fox News, the top-rated host on the “We Report, You Decide” network, a commentator who personified the ugly “isms” that divide America. But once sexual harassment allegations piled up against him, he was out on his ear… replaced in his prime time perch by Carlson. Sure, O'Reilly went from Fox to a streaming show called “No Spin News” but did you even know that?
Neither did I.
Remember Matt Lauer, Chris Cuomo, Charlie Rose? Yes, like O’Reilly, we can still pull up their names and their faces but really, do you have any idea what they’re doing now? Well, five years after getting kicked off CBS, Rose does celebrity interviews that only air on his own website. After CNN fired Chris Cuomo, he went on to anchor a little-known show on a lesser-known network called NewsNation and immediately fell to the bottom of the ratings. And Matt Lauer? He has entirely disappeared from public view, reportedly holed up on his 16,000 acre lakeside farm in New Zealand.
No, I didn’t know that either. None of it. Some anchors who descend in disgrace from their prime positions on television networks still go looking for public prominence, but I could count the number who regain their perch on the fingers of one hand… and I’d still have a few fingers left over.
It proves a time-tested point: the higher they are, the farther they fall.
And so it is today with Fox’s Tucker Carlson.
And CNN’s Don Lemon.
After months of controversy about sexist remarks that he was never able to expunge, Lemon was unceremoniously dismissed this morning with this statement from his network: “CNN and Don have parted ways. Don will forever be a part of the CNN family, and we thank him for his contributions over the past 17 years. We wish him well and will be cheering him on in his future endeavors.”
But that is only the second biggest story on the media landscape about “parting ways” today. The biggest is the even more unceremonious dismissal of Carlson. Here’s Fox’s statement about his departure: “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”
It was a front-of-the-website story on most other media…
But on Fox? It was buried in a box you had to scroll down to, the tenth story on Fox.com. It figures. He had been an embarrassment to the nation for a long time. Now, he had become an embarrassment even to Fox.
So, not so much as a gold watch, let alone a place at the family table, for the man who spoke to millions of viewers each night from his prime time position on Fox and made millions of dollars for his right-wing network.
But of course Carlson cost them millions too. Arguably hundreds of millions. Although the biggest hypocrite on a network packed with hypocrites told a radio interviewer last month that “I love Trump,” what he couldn’t expunge were his private text messages from 2021 which revealed that he didn’t. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately,” he wrote in one. “There isn’t really an upside to Trump,” he wrote in another. On top of those unrepentant perspectives, texts and emails and depositions in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox showed that Tucker Carlson and his fellow hosts as well as top management at Fox knew that Donald Trump’s claims of a rigged election were a lie. They just didn’t say so on the air.
Analysts believe that those sentiments, led and relentlessly amplified by Carlson, were a major reason why Fox was destined to lose the lawsuit. What they proved was, Fox knew full well that when it charged that the voting machine giant had rigged its machines in the 2020 election to turn Donald Trump votes into Joe Biden votes, the on-air purveyors of the charge knew it wasn’t true. The network had to concede as much in its settlement a week ago with Dominion: "We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
The settlement cost Fox $787.5 million. What they must be thinking at headquarters, reflected in their sparse announcement of his expulsion is, thank you Tucker Carlson.
According to CNN’s Lemon, he himself only got the news of his ouster indirectly this morning, after appearing on his morning show as if nothing was wrong, and he bitterly said so a few hours later on Twitter: “I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN. I am stunned. After 17 years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly.”
But maybe he should count his blessings. He got one last shot on the air.
Tucker Carlson didn’t. He signed off on Friday night saying, “We’ll be back.” But he won’t. Not tonight, not ever. Maybe he’ll try the O’Reilly route. May he be no more successful than his predecessor.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Hope Megan Kelly returns. she was the best.
Good reminder of how the mighty fall Greg. And before any throws a pity party for murdoch, keep in mind that newscorp profits were significantly more (nearly $5b) than their dominion settlement. But given that their audience WANTs lies, will it mattet who spews from Carlson’s seat?
Lemon is a different issue-- was he a miscegenist? If yes, i get the dismissal... bit if just his Nikki Haley faux pas, he was “cancel cultured”