The fact that Tucker Carlson’s program is ending so abruptly — no farewell show, no final chance to thank the viewers for tuning in, night after night – is an indication that this was not such an amiable separation and that Fox News did not trust their highest-rated host to appear on-air, even for one last time.
In the coming days and weeks we will learn more about the circumstances that led to Carlson leaving Fox News, but it is hard to believe that the split has nothing to do with Fox News paying $787 million to settle the lawsuit from Dominion. (And don’t forget that the Smartmatic lawsuit still needs to be resolved.)
Ahem. From the Morning Jolt of Wednesday, April 19:
Three: It is unlikely that networks like Fox News can afford to keep loose-cannon hosts anymore.
Dobbs’s name is all over this lawsuit, and out of all of Fox News’ hosts, he offered the most comments cited as defamatory false claims of fact in Judge Davis’s ruling. Fox News dumped Dobbs and his program in February 2021, shortly after Smartmatic filed its lawsuit. It would be overstating it to contend that Lou “Who Reads National Review?” Dobbs single-handedly cost his former employer $787 million. But Dobbs made the job of Dominion lawyers a hell of a lot easier.
You notice it wasn’t Bret Baier, Dana Perino, or Howard Kurtz who got Fox News in trouble. In fact, the network’s news division and reporters are barely mentioned at all in the Dominion lawsuit. The news division, by and large, exercised appropriate skepticism about the lack of evidence for the outrageous claims of Giuliani and Powell. No, it was the prime-time opinion hosts — some would call them the “entertainment” hosts — who turned their studios into platforms for Trump-campaign surrogates to offer every nutty conspiracy theory they could think of, with minimal pushback or skepticism. Every now and then, a host like Jeanine Pirro would offer a comment or question like, “I assume that you are getting to the bottom of exactly what Dominion is, who started Dominion, how it can be manipulated if it is manipulated at all, and what evidence do you have to prove this?” But in the eyes of the court, that wasn’t sufficient.
(One irony: By November 20, Tucker Carlson was tired of Sidney Powell promising bombshell evidence and never delivering. “We invited Sydney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually, and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention. She never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”)
A loose-cannon host who is unpredictable and capable of saying anything — and Fox News is not the only network with on-air talent who fits this description — can end up costing his network hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s not just more than the advertising revenue of any one program; that’s a large chunk of the advertising sales for the entire network over the course of a year. The cost-benefit analysis of cable-news personalities is about to change — and the market for “you never know what he’s going to say next” is about to crash.