Bang in the US: Fox News splits from its flagship Tucker Carlson

The Fox News Channel has abruptly parted ways with its biggest star. On Monday, the right-wing news channel announced in a terse statement that Tucker Carlson was no longer an employee. The channel, which belongs to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, gave no reason. Carlson, age 53, was not speaking for now.

On Fox News itself, a moderator said shortly before 12 a.m. (local time) that the employment relationship had been broken by “consensual”. This sentence is missing in written communication. And at first glance it also sounds a bit unrealistic. Because Fox News also had to admit that there was no replacement for Carlson available for the time being.

“Tucker Carlson Tonight”, as the program has been broadcast since November 2016, attracted about 3 million viewers from Monday to Friday. For an hour, interrupted by several commercials, the right-wing commentator talked about his favorite topic – first of all, about his hatred of the country’s elites, who are members of the so-called “Uniparty”.

The latter is an imaginary entity to which Washington’s political leaders would belong. It’s called “Uniparty” because there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans anymore, for example when it comes to supporting the war in Ukraine. (Carlson is an outspoken critic of the White House course on Ukraine.)

For example, Carlson spoke in his last broadcast on Friday about the alleged devastation of American suburbs, which were reportedly largely white. This destruction is being pushed by the ruling powers for reasons of power politics. That’s typical, the moderator said in one of his signature comments: Government is never about making Americans’ lives better.

Concerns about Carlson’s radicalization

Since Carlson himself is a child of the establishment – his father worked as a reporter for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush after his career – there is probably no other Fox News personality who has so captivated Washington. Pioneers in the capital regularly wondered why Carlson had become so radical in recent years.

What is forgotten today is that the gifted polemicist used to be a gifted journalist. His articles in the (defunct) The Weekly Standard, in which he mocked the capital’s politicians, are still amusing. A young Carlson, whose ancestors also came from Switzerland, also regularly commented on current affairs on the news channels CNN and MSNBC.

The reasons for the divorce can only be speculated for now. Most recently, Carlson made headlines with derogatory remarks he made privately about Republican Donald Trump after the 2020 election. These comments came to light in the course of a libel suit against Fox News, which surprisingly ended last week with a $787.5 damages award. million dollars. (In private messages, Carlson also spoke disparagingly about his superiors and the management of the media company he worked for.)

Trump, however, did not seem to hold a grudge. He gave his first TV interview after the recent indictment in New York to Carlson – who let the former president do his thing and did not ask critical questions.

Carlson also faced a lawsuit from a former employee who complained about the sexist work environment. Carlson recently produced his show in a studio he built for himself in a quaint village on the east coast of Maine. At the latest during the pandemic, he had turned his back on the US capital he grew up in (he once lived door-to-door in Washington with Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son). (aargauerzeitung.ch)