Fox is the Ray Epps of news
Fox fired Tucker Carlson on Monday morning. I was not surprised. Murdoch took a dive on the Dominion defamation suit because the loss gave him a chance to clean house.
When your net worth is estimated at $17.5 billion, you can take a $787 million hit easily, especially when insurance covers some of it. We know he deliberately lost the case because he would have won on appeal. The media has a license to lie called Sullivan v. NYT, in which the Supreme Court said the media can libel anyone simply by calling them a public figure.
Besides, what are facts? Rachel Maddow beat a libel rap by claiming to be an entertainer, not a newswoman.
Dominion’s cheating was a distraction from the real evil of the 2020 election: ballot harvesting. Democrats were able to get people to vote from home. Voter participation leaped from 56% of 67% — setting a century high by a large margin. People voted from home because so many Americans are too lazy to go to the polls.
What is amazing is 75 million people went to the polls and voted for Trump. No president had done that before.
Fox has been over for some time. Audiences just did not realize that. Once Murdoch fired Roger Ailes, Fox became worthless because it lost its champion of conservativism. Oh, a few stars emerged to replace Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelly, neither of whom were all that conservative. But Hannity phones it in and Laura Ingraham is as exciting as boiling water for tea.
Carlson apparently is a conservative. He used humor and facts to counter the liberal narrative of the day. He kept spirits up and served as a thorn in the side of The Establishment. He will be missed if only for the times he occasionally made the news, as I do not watch Fox.
Fox News was always just counter-programming in Murdoch’s mind. For him it was ABC moving The Partridge Family from Friday nights to Saturday nights to provide an alternative to All in the Family. The difference is Fox News succeeded. The poor partridges were fricasseed as they lost more than half their audience.
Murdoch is at best a commonwealth conservative — you know, the ones in English-speaking socialist countries who are OK with banning guns but draw the line at banning knives and narwhal tusks. He is in the news business for the money but also for the prestige. When an outlet bores him, he shutters the place. The staff at The News of the World found that out. It was gone after 167 years despite a circulation of 2 million in a country with one-fifth our population.
As with Fox, Murdoch used a lawsuit as an excuse for the move. His house-cleaning at Fox includes its audience.
This may jeopardize its status as the No. 1 network on cable but losing audiences is not as big a deal as people think. ABC replaced The Partridge Family with The Odd Couple on Friday nights and did not skip a beat. Some show had to be sacrificed going up against All in the Family. ABC executives chose the one they liked least.
As for Carlson being shown the door, Bobby Kennedy Jr. had a different take, which reflects his interests.
He tweeted, “Fox fired Tucker Carlson five days after he crossed the red line by acknowledging that the TV networks pushed a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their Pharma advertisers. Carlson’s breathtakingly courageous April 19 monologue broke TV’s two biggest rules: Tucker told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content and he lambasted obsequious newscasters for promoting jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless. For many years, Tucker has had the nation’s biggest audience averaging 3.5 million — 10 times the size of CNN. Fox just demonstrated the terrifying power of Big Pharma.”
Others have noted the firing followed Chuck Schumer’s demand that Carlson’s head be served to him on a plate.
While I don’t reject those two notions completely, I am sticking with my own take because I believe Murdoch could have won that lawsuit.
As expected, the reaction to Carlson’s firing by the rest of the media was sheer joy. The same media that whined about Elon Musk cleaning house at Twitter now cheers Murdoch cleaning house at Fox. Well, they own the enterprises. They can do what they want with them.
The Jeff Bezos Post mentioned the lawsuit — Murdoch’s excuse for the canning — but Paragraphs 5 and 6 rang far truer.
The Post said, “But it was Carlson’s comments about Fox management, as revealed in the Dominion case, that played a role in his departure from Fox, a person familiar with the company’s thinking told The Post.
“‘Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?’ Carlson wrote to a colleague in a message a day after Fox, like other media outlets, called the election for Joe Biden. It was a sentiment echoed by others at Fox in the fall of 2020, as even network officials who disbelieved Trump’s election-fraud conspiracy theories fretted that countering them strongly would alienate their conservative viewers.”
What was left out of the story was Fox really lost credibility by calling Arizona — which Trump lost by a scant 11,000 votes — first and before it called Texas, which Trump won by 5 points, and Ohio, which Trump won by 8 points.
Mediaite said, “Carlson often defiantly flouted facts from his powerful perch. He continued to promote the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. His bizarre coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol prompted searing rebukes from Republicans in the Senate. His promotion of the Ray Epps conspiracy theory has been widely condemned.”
Russiagate’s lies cost no one their jobs.
The cover-up of Hunter’s laptop cost no one their jobs.
The lies about the Raid on Mar-a-Lago cost no one their jobs.
Welcome to post-truth America. If Carlson is surprised, he has not been paying attention to what has happened to us. We are no longer a great nation because we are led by greedy little bastards who saw nothing wrong with Hillary emailing state secrets to Red China and to foreign donors of her fake charity while secretary of State.
We are led by greedy little bastards who saw nothing wrong with Barack Hussein Obama using the FBI to spy on candidate Donald John Trump.
We are led by greedy little bastards who saw nothing wrong with Biden withholding a billion dollars in aid to Ukraine until it fired the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, the company that gave his worthless son an $800,000-a-year no-show job.
That Fox had a few rabble rousers who did question these events shows Murdoch is not as big a bastard as the Sulzberger in charge of NYT, the token running AP, the CEOs of Disney and the rest, and the social media outlets that took government handouts to censor conservatives and other dissidents.
But Murdoch is a bastard nonetheless and his network is once again neutered. This time the snip will work. The chick who runs Fox will rid the network of those who dare question transsexual surgery on children or who dare support Donald Trump.
I have news for her: she, too, is as disposable as a tissue.
In other news, Don Lemon said CNN fired him.
