Within the days after the 2020 election, the Fox host Tucker Carlson despatched an anxious textual content message to one in every of his producers. Fox viewers have been livid in regards to the community’s determination to name Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The defeated president, Donald J. Trump, was eagerly stoking their anger. As Mr. Carlson and his producer batted round concepts for a brand new Carlson podcast — one which may assist win again the viewers most indignant about Mr. Trump’s defeat — they noticed each alternative and peril within the second.
“He may simply destroy us if we play it incorrect,” Mr. Carlson warned, in a textual content launched throughout Fox’s now-settled litigation with the voting software program firm Dominion.
Mr. Carlson proved prophetic, if not totally in the best way he had predicted. His practically six-year reign in prime-time cable got here to a sudden finish on Monday, as Fox abruptly minimize ties with the host, thanking him in a terse information launch “for his service to the community.”
And whereas the precise circumstances of his departure remained hazy on Monday night, the dismissal comes amid a collection of high-stakes — and already high-priced — authorized battles emanating from Fox’s postelection marketing campaign to placate Mr. Trump’s base and win again viewers who believed that his defeat was a sham.
His departure upended Fox’s profitable prime-time lineup and shocked a media world much more accustomed to Mr. Carlson’s outstanding endurance. Over his years at Fox, the host had proved able to withstanding controversy after controversy.
The community caught by him — as did Lachlan Murdoch, chief government of the Fox Company — after Mr. Carlson claimed that immigration had made America “poor and dirtier.” He appeared to shrug off his on-air popularization of a racist conspiracy idea often known as the “nice alternative,” together with revelations that he was a prodigious airer of the corporate’s personal soiled laundry. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Carlson’s present continuously promoted the Kremlin’s standpoint, attacking U.S. sanctions and blaming the battle on American designs for increasing NATO.
The drought of premium advertisers on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” — pushed away by boycotts concentrating on his extra racist and inflammatory segments — didn’t appear to dent his standing throughout the community, as long as the viewers caught round. Disdainful of the cable community’s prime executives, Mr. Carlson cultivated the impression that he was near the Murdoch household and, maybe, untouchable.
Mr. Carlson’s rise as a populist pundit and media determine prefigured Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Occasion: His personal conversion from bow-tied libertarian to vengeful populist traced the nativist insurgency that fractured and remade the celebration throughout the Obama years. However he prospered in tandem with Mr. Trump’s presidency, because the New York actual property tycoon made frank nativism and seething cultural resentment the first touchstones of conservative politics.
Regardless of his personal disparagement of Mr. Trump — “I hate him,” Mr. Carlson texted a colleague in January 2021 — Mr. Carlson electrified the president’s white, older base with vivid monologues about elite corruption, American decay and a grand plan by “the ruling class” to switch “legacy” People with a flood of migrants from different nations and cultures. With deliberate, hypnotic repetition, he warned viewers that “they” needed to regulate and destroy “you.”
Crucially, he labored to assist Fox woo Trump supporters again to the community within the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat.
In broadcast after broadcast, he unspooled a counternarrative claiming falsely that the election had been “seized from the arms of voters” and suggesting that the voting had been rife with fraud and corruption. After Trump supporters — whipped right into a frenzy partially by Mr. Trump and Fox — stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, he recast the assault as a largely peaceable protest in opposition to professional wrongdoing, its violence the product of a false-flag operation orchestrated by the F.B.I.
As a programming technique, it labored: Final yr, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged greater than three million whole viewers an evening. At his top, and maybe nonetheless, Mr. Carlson counted among the many most influential figures on the precise.
But when Fox and its star host as soon as prospered due to Mr. Trump, their efforts to disclaim or overturn the election outcomes have additionally thrust each the community and the previous president into authorized peril.
Mr. Trump faces one investigation by a federal particular counsel over his efforts to retain energy after dropping and one other by an area prosecutor in Georgia that started after the defeated president, decided to prevail, requested Georgia’s secretary of state to “discover” sufficient votes to overturn the election outcomes there.
Fox agreed final week to pay three-quarters of a billion {dollars} to settle a defamation declare introduced by Dominion, which had sued Fox for spreading false accusations that the voting software program firm was on the heart of an unlimited conspiracy to cheat Mr. Trump of victory in 2020.
Mr. Carlson and his present featured prominently in Dominion case. And 1000’s of pages of inner texts and emails launched as a part of the go well with revealed that the community’s embrace of election-fraud theories — and their promotion by company and personalities at Fox Information and Fox Enterprise — have been a part of a broader marketing campaign to assuage viewers indignant about Mr. Trump’s loss.
In addition they revealed that neither Mr. Carlson nor his fellow hosts actually believed that the election was rigged, regardless of their on-air commentary. And texts confirmed that Mr. Carlson held Fox’s titular executives in low regard, slamming them for “destroying our credibility” — for permitting Fox to precisely report Mr. Biden’s win — and belittling them as a “mixture of incompetent liberals and prime management with an excessive amount of satisfaction to again down.”
The corporate can be going through a lawsuit from a former Carlson producer, Abby Grossberg, who mentioned that she confronted sexual harassment from different Carlson employees members and was coached by Fox legal professionals to downplay the function of stories executives in permitting unproven allegations of voting fraud onto the air.
One more election know-how firm that featured in Fox’s protection of supposed election fraud, Smartmatic, continues to be suing the community. In its criticism, Smartmatic mentioned that Fox knowingly aired greater than 100 false statements about its merchandise. A day after the go well with was filed in 2021, Fox Enterprise canceled the present hosted by Lou Dobbs, who had been among the many foremost spreaders of baseless theories involving election fraud.
Within the wake of Mr. Carlson’s abrupt dismissal, present and former Fox workers buzzed with hypothesis in regards to the true causes for his firing, and what it mentioned in regards to the firm plans transferring ahead.
Few appeared to consider that Mr. Carlson was being punished for his prolonged historical past of inflammatory remarks on-air — if that’s the case, why now? — or for his previously personal criticisms of Fox executives. (Some identified that his fellow prime-time hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have been equally scathing in their very own textual content messages.)
A extra attention-grabbing query, maybe, is what Mr. Carlson will do subsequent.
Like his clearest mental predecessor, the commentator and politician Patrick J. Buchanan, Mr. Carlson is likely one of the few individuals to search out success as not solely a tv entertainer, but additionally an institution-builder — he co-founded the pioneering right-wing tabloid The Day by day Caller — and a motion chief. Greater than every other determine with a mainstream platform, he succeeded in convey far-right concepts about immigration and tradition to a broad viewers.
He’s additionally, now, among the many only a few tv skills to have been canceled by all three main cable information networks. Earlier than Fox, he had a long term as a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” and later headlined a present at MSNBC. Lately, he served as each a pillar of Fox Information’s prime-time lineup and the biggest-name draw on the corporate’s paid streaming community, Fox Nation, the place he aired a thrice-weekly discuss present and occasional documentaries.
Inside hours of his firing on Monday, not less than one putative job supply was forthcoming.
“Hey @TuckerCarlson,” tweeted RT, the Russian state-backed media channel. “You’ll be able to at all times query extra with @RT_com.”