How Tucker Carlson Lost His Job

The Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has been criticized for years for propagating racist and anti-immigrant viewpoints. But they didn’t seem to have much of an impact on his passing.

Instead, a rising number of issues surrounding Carlson’s behavior both on and off the air had started to irk Fox News officials, and the network unexpectedly announced his resignation yesterday.

In Carlson’s inaccurate coverage of the January 6 attacks, in which he portrayed rioters as “mostly peaceful” spectators, network executives and contributors had protested, and some had even departed. As part of the case Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox, which the network resolved this week, his reporting on 2020 election conspiracies was at issue. As The Washington Post wrote, Carlson had also publicly criticized Fox management, saying they had damaged the network’s reputation by allowing it to correctly predict President Biden’s victory.

Additionally, a former producer recently charged Carlson of managing a sexist and discriminating workplace in a lawsuit. Fox has refuted her assertions.

Carlson played a significant impact in conservative politics since he was one of the most popular anchors on the most viewed cable news network. The topic of today’s email will be Carlson’s influence and the implications of his departure for Fox News.

A big crowd

Carlson immediately established himself as a mainstay on the right-wing network and in conservative politics when he took over Fox News’ prized 8 o’clock time slot in 2017. He enhanced the network’s already-high ratings.

How? Carlson capitalized on white viewers’ worries about the nation’s shifting racial makeup, which helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election. He would frequently dwell on the racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement,” which holds that elites are importing servile foreigners to weaken native-born Americans. Thousands of immigrants, according to Carlson’s 2018 argument, are making America “poorer and dirtier.”

Carlson frequently highlighted regional news items while distorting them to draw generalizations about how Americans were losing control of their nation. He stated that “Gypsies” were causing mayhem in a tiny Pennsylvania town by urinating and defecating in the streets in a 2017 program.

“The message of these segments was always the same: You and your way of life are under attack, and the people doing the attacking look different and have different values than you do,” my colleague Nicholas Confessore, who covered Carlson’s rise for The Times, told me yesterday. “Carlson reassured viewers that their discomfort was reasonable — that they didn’t have to feel bad about their fears and worries.”

Carlson achieved this by endorsing Trumpism rather than Trump himself. The approach has some personal elements. Carlson declared of Trump in text messages that “I hate him passionately.” According to Nicholas, it also helped Carlson set himself apart from other Fox News personalities. The presenters Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham frequently had to defend Trump when he said something inappropriate since they strongly identified with him. Carlson made an effort to stay clear of these traps by emphasizing the core idea rather than Trump as its public face.

Carlson’s strategy was well received by Fox’s predominately white audience, and he consistently attracted more than three million viewers every night, ranking his program either first or second on the network. Additionally, despite the fact that advertisers left Fox as a result of claims of racism and fabrications, the popularity of Carlson’s program improved the network’s ad income.

What Carlson will do following that is unknown. But if he doesn’t have that large following, he probably won’t be as powerful.

Future uncertainty

Fox News announced that until a permanent replacement could be found, hosts will alternate in the 8 p.m. time slot. This appears to be a disastrous situation for the network at first glance: not only did it lose one of its top stars, but it also has no successor in the works. The announcement also comes after months of negative press for Fox, which just reached a $787.5 million settlement over Dominion’s lawsuit.

However, Fox has faced adversity with its hosts in the past. Bill O’Reilly, who had previously been the most well-liked personality on the network, was replaced by Carlson, who not only kept O’Reilly’s ratings steady but occasionally even increased them. Fox could have concluded from that experience that the network has greater influence over its audience than individual individuals do.

Roger Ailes, a former executive at Fox, used to periodically bench his prime time stars for a night to show them that the numbers held steady without them, proving that Fox was responsible for their success, Nicholas said. “I suspect the audience loyalty to Fox is probably greater than the audience loyalty to any particular Fox star,” he continued.