In 2017 “resistance” liberalism was reaching its peak. And in April of that year, for one of the first times ever, that movement was able to celebrate a victory. There are few cultural forces that American liberals dislike more than Fox News (even today), and six years ago, there were few Fox News personalities whom they disliked more than Bill O’Reilly. For two decades, O’Reilly had personified the network’s bombastic brand of petty paleoconservatism. His nightly prime-time show, an alleged “no-spin zone” called The O’Reilly Factor, was expert at nurturing its viewers’ grievances and resentments, and at directing their ire at liberal elites and the mainstream media. O’Reilly was Fox News—but then, amid a flurry of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and advertiser boycotts, O’Reilly was out. The liberal resistance dared to dream that his was the first of many heads to roll.
O’Reilly’s replacement was Tucker Carlson, who, at the time, was probably best known as the boyish, milquetoast former co-host of Crossfire. Though by 2017 Carlson had already begun to pivot toward the sharper-elbowed right, for the median viewer back then he still embodied a brand of moderate, bow-tied conservatism that liberals and the left could respect, if not endorse—the Corner, not VDare. Carlson had even logged a handful of Slate bylines over the years. He did not seem like a natural fit in O’Reilly’s time slot, and his ascent at the network seemed to perhaps imply a pivot away from his predecessor’s brand of toxic populism.
We all know how that turned out. Carlson would spend the next six years sounding the same themes as O’Reilly had, only with a harder, more menacing tone. If O’Reilly spoke for the barstool blowhard who shouts slurs at the television while watching the Knicks lose, Carlson spoke for the very online seditionists who openly suggest that what this country really needs is a good old-fashioned race war. Leaning into the xenophobic cruelty of the Trump era while eagerly platforming any and all allegedly “canceled” liberal apostates in an ongoing mission to underscore the purported intolerance of the left, Carlson took O’Reilly’s formula and refined it into pure, uncut poison. Pretty soon, if O’Reilly was remembered at all, he was remembered wistfully, as an avatar of a gentler era on the network.
And now, in April 2023, Carlson is gone too, even more abruptly than his predecessor, though perhaps under a similar cloud. Once again, the ouster is being crowed about by liberals who really should have learned better by now. In a terse Monday statement that raised at least as many questions as it answered, Fox News announced that the network and the host had agreed to part ways, effective immediately. The final episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, then, was the one that had aired on Friday, April 21—six years to the day that the last episode of the Factor aired. This timing should serve as a reminder that, at Fox News, there is only ever some even-worse replacement waiting in the wings.
While the exact circumstances of Carlson’s departure are still unknown, to my mind there are only three plausible reasons for this sudden de facto cancellation. The first possible reason is that there is, perhaps, some piece of very bad news that might soon come out about the host, and that Fox News is cutting its losses now in order to get out ahead of the fallout. There’s been some early reporting to support this thesis; the Los Angeles Times reported Monday that the move was “related to the discrimination lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, the producer filed by the network last month.” (Among other things, Grossberg’s lawsuit alleges that she was the target of sexist and antisemitic comments while working on Carlson’s show.) If true, this circumstance would be a very on-brand one for Fox News, actually—I’ve lost count of the former Fox personalities who departed the network under a behavioral cloud—but it’s also the least fun to speculate about. If Carlson did or was party to something slimy or unethical (more so than the everyday sliminess inherent to his show, I mean), then the news will come out soon enough.
The second possible reason for Carlson’s departure might be that the host finally came out on the losing end of a long-term internal power struggle at the network. There’ve been signs for a while that Tucker Carlson Tonight was something of its own sphere of influence at the network, and it’s fair to speculate that network bigwigs didn’t necessarily love that their top prime-time star was a bit ungovernable. One of the interesting takeaways from the internal Fox communications that were unearthed as part of discovery in the recently settled Dominion case was the implication that even Rupert Murdoch himself couldn’t control what Carlson did or did not say on the air. (The Los Angeles Times piece mentioned above also reports that Murdoch was the one who pushed Carlson out the door.)
Indeed, given the often-wide gulf between what Carlson covered on his show and what his prime-time colleagues covered on theirs, it sometimes felt as if the host were conspicuously ignoring whatever programming diktats had been handed down from Fox’s top execs. In March, for instance, Carlson’s show made much of some Jan. 6 security-camera footage it had obtained from Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy that purported to show that that day’s violent insurrection had actually been very peaceful. But Carlson was basically alone on the network in covering this so-called scoop. Few of his colleagues initially touched the story, and when Bret Baier finally covered it on Special Report the next day, he did so very skeptically. It seemed obvious that someone high up at Fox had intervened—perhaps because the aftermath of the 2020 election had already caused the network enough trouble?
Carlson’s, erm, irrepressibility must have been aggravating enough under normal circumstances at a network controlled by a man who has long insisted that his hosts remain on message—his message. But the approach of the 2024 presidential election and the fallout from the Dominion case makes me wonder whether the network has less tolerance than ever for deviations from the company line. When Fox settled with Dominion last Wednesday for $787.5 million, I was initially adamant that the settlement would not prompt any major programming changes at the network—and, indeed, that Fox had settled the case in part to preserve the status quo there. Over the past few days, though, there’ve been signs that this might have been a premature assessment.
On Thursday, Fox announced that it was cutting ties with the choleric Dan Bongino, a weekend host and frequent contributor who was basically a windup toy programmed to mouth-kiss Donald Trump while whitewashing Jan. 6. Given the timing, it’s fair to evaluate Carlson’s departure in tandem with Bongino’s. Both men, programming-wise, were likely considered loose cannons and therefore, in the network’s post-Dominion world, potential legal liabilities. Both men have been very willing to diminish the import of Jan. 6 while welcoming Donald Trump’s political resurgence, even as their ultimate boss at Fox, Rupert Murdoch, has acknowledged the gravity of Jan. 6 while holding Trump in evident contempt. Axing Carlson and Bongino sends a very clear message about who is still in control at the network—and perhaps about the depth of the boss’s anger at how much money his least pliable employees have cost him.
I’ve been saying for months now that the Murdochs are pragmatists first and foremost, and that they will not let their personal animus for Trump stop Fox News from covering him reverentially again if the ex-president keeps on leading the polls. While I still think I’ll be proved right over the long term, I may have underestimated the Murdochs’ reluctance to just roll over and play dead for the former president. If the Murdochs disliked Donald Trump before the Dominion settlement, they now have 787,500,000 new reasons to hate him—Fox would not have had to pay Dominion anything at all had Trump not put it in a no-win position with his stolen-election lies in November 2020. It’s possible to read the Carlson/Bongino departures as signs that the network is potentially less willing to go all in on Trump 2024; that it will still try to do its best to deliver the nomination to someone else; and that it will gladly part ways with any personality who might not be willing to toe the network’s line.
But if I had to guess what really went on here, I’d guess something a little more boring. I’d bet that Fox News has been wanting to move against Carlson for a while but couldn’t do so as long as the Dominion lawsuit was still in play—perhaps for fear that if the network fired the host before the case was resolved, he would go scorched-earth on his former employer if he was called to testify in open court. This guess is very much a speculative one. But even if it’s accurate, it would be a mistake to presume that the network’s abrupt pivot away from Carlson means that the network is also planning to pivot away from the host’s vicious brand of populism. When it comes to the culture wars, the post-Dominion Fox News still isn’t likely to moderate its grievances. The network was built on a foundation of aggrieved culture-war bullshit. If it demolishes that foundation, the entire edifice will crumble.
Fox News will find someone else to take Carlson’s slot. It’s a safe bet that this person will follow in his predecessors’ footsteps, and will find new and awful ways to sound the same themes of grievance and resentment that have been playing in the 8 p.m. time slot on the network for 25 years. As for Carlson himself, well, while anything’s possible, there’s not much precedent for deposed Fox News prime-time stars remaining prominent after losing their platforms. O’Reilly now has a subscription website and a web series; his new book, Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts, comes out in September. If the modern-day right loves anything, it’s fixating on witch hunts. Perhaps Tucker has another book in him too. He certainly will have the free time.
