Tucker Carlson and Fox News Part Company, But Why?

It’s likely that we’ll never learn the truth here, but here are a few theories:

• Fox and/or its chairman Rupert Murdoch was angry that Carlson cost them $757.5 million in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case, and that they now face a much larger settlement to Smartmatic, on the precise same case elements.  This explanation seems unlikely, considering that Fox had, via Carlson and others, promoted the Big Lie from the start, right after the thumping that Trump took in the election, in an attempt to maintain its viewership base.  Millions of Americans were, and continue to be, hungry to receive that message, regardless of whether it’s true.

Enormous amounts of ad revenues hung in the balance.  If Fox admitted what they and the rest of the world knew to be the truth, i.e., that there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, their viewers would have quickly jumped to Newsmax or OAN, “news” organizations that have even lower levels of integrity than Fox itself.  This story, of course, came straight from Murdoch’s under-oath deposition in the Dominion case.

• Carlson’s ouster was part of the settlement, the details of which are very unlikely ever to be revealed.

• Carlson left voluntarily so as to begin to distance himself and his $420 million net worth from the sinking ship that is Fox News.  That also seems unlikely, since the damage has been done. He can say that he used to be a professional liar (or that he used to “hate Donald Trump passionately”), but now he’s found Jesus, or whatever.  But what value could that possibly represent against future plaintiffs in defamation cases that focus on the lies he told before the day he was dismissed from Fox?

• There is scuttlebutt to the effect that Carlson’s genius-level capacity get away with these lies makes him a long-term liability to Fox, but this I find most preposterous of them all.  The entire right-wing “news” industry is based on deliberately misleading viewers with lies or other distortions.  In his former position, Carlson was no more egregious than anyone else; in fact, he’s more credible to my Fox-loving mom than Sean Hannity, whom she considers to be “over the top.”  Unless Fox plans to re-invent itself as an online shopping network or a cooking or sports channel, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Perhaps the answer to the mystery will reveal itself as Fox News continues to receive its ongoing legal pelting/public flogging of epic proportions.

I doubt it.