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When Even Politico Doesn't Buy The Latest Reason For Tucker Carlson's Firing, You Know It's BS. [1]

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Date: 2023-05-03

The New York Times may believe what it’s anonymous source(s) has provided with the latest “reason” for Fox’s firing of Tucker Carlson (“Just look at Carlson’s racist text from Jan 7th!), but not even Politico is buying this bullshit. The hosts on late afternoon and evening shows on MSNBC are trashing this NYT story, but only us liberals watch that network. However, when you have lost Politico, who else is going to believe this story?

Jack Shafer has probably the Occam’s Razor explanation for this “Let’s blame Tucker’s racism for all of Fox’s woes!” Basically, it’s a big shiny object to distract the rest of the media from asking anymore questions about Fox’s lies about the 2020 Election. And I agree that may be the whole point of all these behind the scenes text and even video of Carlson’s vileness showing up on multiple media websites.

What’s Really Behind the Release of Tucker Carlson’s Texts Scrutiny on the former Fox star helps the network avoid attention on the disaster of the Dominion settlement. How is that the biggest media story of the decade — the settlement of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox News for what appears to be an unprecedented sum of $787.5 million — has been displaced by reporting on the wicked things Tucker Carlson expressed off-camera? The April 24 firing of Carlson, Fox News’ prime-time ratings king almost immediately crowded the April 18 settlement out of the news as reporters competed to determine why he’d gotten the ax. The stories, which consumed a weeklong media flurry, picked up again on Tuesday evening as the New York Times published its story about a text message by Carlson, harvested in the lawsuit’s discovery process but redacted, that allegedly unnerved the Fox board of directors and “contributed to a chain of events that ultimately led to Mr. Carlson’s firing.”

And let’s look at what has happened since Carlson’s firing. We have been provided with behind the scenes of Carlson, three of which have ended up on Media Matters website.

Here’s Tucker trashing Fox Nation.

Here’s Tucker “Being Creepy” on the set.

And here’s the latest video of Tucker calling Dominion’s lawyer a “slimy little motherfucker.”

Someone at Fox has been a busy bee leaking all this negative material about Tucker. Which brings up back to Shafer’s piece:

It could be the case that Carlson’s comments, which included the observation that a 3-on-1 beatdown is “not how white men fight,” was instrumental in the host’s sacking. But on inspection, the Times piece and a similar Washington Post story that followed suggest that the Carlson pile-on (which he deserves) is less about breaking news and more about crisis management by Fox. If that’s the case, the strategy is working magic. Almost nobody is talking about the shoddy journalism Fox produced to help advance the “stolen election” lie and its lack of public contrition for the role it played in helping foment the Jan. 6 insurrection. They’re talking about Carlson’s off-camera trash talk, much of which only echoes in more profane and pungent terms what he’s said on his show or in interviews. The point of this inquiry isn’t to provide Carlson any relief — he deserves all the scrutiny his firing has brought him — but to examine the motives of the unnamed sources who have risen against him in recent days. Why have so many powerful actors chosen this moment to slag Carlson, when none of the behaviors described clash with the way he’s carried on for years? One possibility is that people who are working for Fox have assembled a PR campaign to discredit the network’s former star that will throw the press pack off doing additional coverage on the Dominion case. It’s like a fighter jet releasing a flare to fool an enemy’s heat-seeking missile. Why theorize in this direction? Because the story that’s currently being put out there just doesn’t add up.

As others on Daily Kos have pointed out, there is ample evidence of Carlson’s racism. Mehdi Hasan has a small montage of Carlson’s racism over the years. And this is the same case that Shafer makes. This should NOT have been news to the Fox Board. No way. No how.

Otherwise, you have to assume that no on the Fox Board ever watched Tucker Carlson’s show.

The other point is that the infamous text message was just one part of the Dominion lawsuit, and in fact, there is no guarantee that the text message would have been brough up during the trial. In fact, Carlson was not even the worst offender on Fox when it came to the BIG LIE. Maria Bartiroma and Jeanine Pirro were pushing the Big Lie with more frequency than Carlson.

So why was Carlson fired? We may never know the real reason why. I think part of it was Fox didn’t want another expensive sexual harassmant settlement over an on air Fox personality (O’Reilly and Ailes). With over 90 tapes, former Tucker Carlson producer Grossberg will probably get a hefty settlement over the misogynistic environment on Carlson’s show. Getting rid of Carlson sooner rather than later may reduce the amount of any future settlement.

Or there is the other theory that Carlson got too big for his britches. Basically, Carlson was dictating policy and demands to GOP leaders — think of Kevin McCarthy giving over 40,000 hours of security tape from Jan 6th to Tucker Carlson. There is only one boss at Fox, and it is Rupert Murdoch.

But whatever the reason, Fox is taking advantage of shitcanning Carlson to put the focus of Fox’s problems on him. And it’s helping to stop the drip, drip, drip of damaging information from Fox’s exposure as a propaganda network and not a news organization. Don’t get me wrong. I hate Carlson, and he deserves whatever he get meted out to him. But Murdoch is pulling another, “Look! Squirrel!” on the rest of the American media.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/3/2167394/-When-Even-Politico-Doesn-t-Buy-The-Latest-Reason-For-Tucker-Carlson-s-Firing-You-Know-It-s-BS

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