To tell the truth, I didn’t think Fox News would shit-can Tucker Carlson so quick. Oh, I believed they’d fire him some time, just not this quickly. I thought they’d at least keep him on through the rest of the year and into 2024. It’s like the part in the movie where you think the most popular actor is going to make it but their character is killed off halfway or two-thirds the way through. What a twist, indeed!
Tucker was Fox News’ goldenboy after they had to let Bill O’Reilly go six years ago amid reports of sexual harassment. Tucker was the Gen X equivalent to O’Reilly and he was able to lie about the news and the facts in a way that O’Reilly never would or could. O’Reilly was a Boomer. He had his own technique that appealed to the Boomers in the post-9/11 world. I’m not defending the horrible piece of human feces stuck to a piece of toilet paper on the taint that is O’Reilly but at least he’s not that God-awful phlegm gobbler, which contains mucus and possible food morsels stuck in your esophagus, that you hock up after a bad cold or flu is on its way out of your system.
Come to think about it, I don’t know if that’s worse or bette
Carlson was the answer to the question of what exactly happens to the WASP antagonistic character in a 1980s teen sex comedy years after the credits roll. He looked more like he had been assembled from Central Casting to be the ultimate product of the Nixon/Reagan ideal of what a conservative American should look like and behave in the latter quarter of the 20th Century. And the one thing he did especially well that both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did was to present hypothetical scenarios to scare the living daylights out of any conservative and/or white person who is still worried everytime a brown skinned person of Middle-East ancestry boards a commercial passenger plane.
Unlike Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or many other conservative commentors, I don’t think Carlson ever really believe a good portion of what he ever said online. It was just a scare tactic. But he said it in a way that Limbaugh’s loud-mouth delivery or Beck’s whiny tone would’ve made some turn the channel. Carlson was to paraphrase a quote “bad for America but good for ratings.” There’s people like Carlson in every community out there, which is why he was so easy to transition off of O’Reilly’s strict school principal persona.
Carlson wasn’t fired for all the lies and bullshit he helped flame in the post-2020 election that more or less encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection coup attempt. He was fired because he was dangerous to Fox News in the financial department. The Dominion Voting System lawsuit is one of many lawsuits Fox News is facing. What no one is talking about is a discrimination lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, a producer, who claims she was a victim of Carlson’s anti-Semitic bullying.
The fact that he’s not getting fired for all the shit that went down over the years with the spreading theories of reverse racism, advocating white supremacy and even the whole 2020 election. The text messages proved he didn’t practice what he preached. Murdoch let him say all this stuff for over two years because it’s good for ratings.
It’s the O’Reilly firing all over again. Get rid of the person now before it gets worse. While the firing has cost Fox about $700 million in their market value in the last 24 hours, there’s the additional $787 million in the lawsuit settlement. But the cheers might be short-lived. It’s a change for Fox News but it’s not the end. One of my friends commented this is like the scene in a Friday the 13th movie where they think Jason is dead, so they go off and have sex to celebrate.
Yes, Carlson will come back and Fox News will probably rebound as they are jumbling ways to write of the settlement. But this is the third major news network Carlson has been fired from following CNN and MSNBC. What next? Newsmas or OAN. Do they even have the money to attract him? OAN founder Robert Herring Sr. has offered $25 million to Carlson. But OAN has been dropped by DirecTV, so that means he doesn’t have as big of an audience. O’Reilly has his own website, but I dont feel Carlson wants to go that route. It’s been a very quiet six years with O’Reilly gone from the mainstream.
Carlson like other people on the right are finally facing some accountability for their actions. But I don’t think it’s enough. Carlson will survive. Even though he helped Trump and other Stop the Steal officials grow their fanbase, he’ll be unscathed from the Jan. 6 events. Carlson later turned his attention to “wokeness” and “cancel culture” freaking out over a design change to the green M&M.
At the same time, Don Lemon was fired from CNN amid allegations of sexism and mistreatments of staff. Then, there was the firing of Jeff Shell at NBCUniversal amid reports of an “inappropriate relationship” with a staffer. The question on my mind is six years after O’Reilly and the MeToo, you’d think people would learn to toe the line a little safer. If this was 2018 or 2019, I could understand people acting like the star athlete after the big game playing “Grab-Ass” with anyone they want.
Maybe they felt like Carlson, they were too big to be let go or replaced. They should know that TV is all about replacing people. Bewitched replaced Dick York with Dick Sargent. Valerie Harper and Roseanne Barr were fired from TV shows that were freaking named after them. The cocky arrogrance of all three is what resulted in them losing their jobs. They have no one to blame but themselves.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 