Newly leaked video depicts Tucker Carlson in a verbal tussle with one of his producers from Fox Nation (Fox News’ soon-to-be-defunct dysfunctional streaming platform), over what he would be allowed to wear for an interview with manosphere influencer Andrew Tate.
BREAKING: Leaked Tucker Carlson Footage: “I don’t want to be a slave to Fox Nation, which I don’t think that many people watch anyway”
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 1, 2023
Carlson can be seen offering the following retort to henpecking from an unnamed producer to wear a sweater for the interview:
I don’t want to be a slave to Fox Nation, which I don’t think that people watch anyway. We’re gonna — because, you know, I’m like a representative of the American media now, speaking to an exile in Romania and welcoming him back into the brotherhood of journalists…. But nobody’s going to watch it on Fox Nation. Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks. So I’d really like to just put the — dump the whole thing on YouTube. But anyway, that’s just my view, OK. I’m just frustrated with it. It’s hard to use that site. I don’t know why they’re not fixing it. It’s driving me insane. And they’re like making, like, Lifetime movies. But they don’t, they don’t work on the infrastructure of the site. Like what? It’s crazy. And it drives me crazy because it’s like we’re doing all this extra work and no one can find it. It’s unbelievable, actually.
Unlike other recent leaks that have depicted Carlson in arguably poor form, it’s hard to imagine that this leak to Media Matters emanated from Fox News leadership, due to how incompetent it makes them and their trendy streaming platform look.
Related: Ex-Producer Suing Tucker Carlson Never Actually Met Him
These producers are so incompetent, in fact, that it boggles the mind that they retain their positions. In this instance, they appear to truly believe it would make a damn bit of difference to viewership what kind of shirt Carlson would wear for his interview with Tate — not the substance of his questions or the rhetorical approach he would take.
All hat, no cattle, as the phrase goes — the Roger Ailes ethos. Aesthetics über alles.
The Tucker leaks have been coming fast and furious for the past few weeks, accelerating after he was taken off air for reasons the company has yet to fully elaborate on in any form of explicit communiqué.
This has triggered massive speculation from pundits offering their own two cents on why Fox News would so unceremoniously cancel its cash cow.
I am of the view, based on the totality of the evidence, that the cause was an amalgamation of factors rather than any one thing.
I suspect Carlson was already looking for a way out from Fox due to BS like forcing him to wear a sweater for his streaming show. The company knew he was trying to get loose on his own terms, and so the company pulled the plug early to try to save face and get out ahead of the latent conflict.
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