Fox’s firing of the most-watched host on cable news, Tucker Carlson, is still roiling Leftists and patriots alike, but now Carlson himself has said that it didn’t actually happen at all. In a text message to the news analysis site 19FortyFive, Carlson said flatly: “I’m still employed by Fox.” This doesn’t mean, however, that all is forgiven and that his show will be back on the air Monday. On the contrary, it could hinder Carlson’s plans to take his truth-telling elsewhere.
In his message to 19FortyFive, Carlson was actually confirming what another former Fox host, Megyn Kelly, revealed on Thursday: “I want to, I think, break some news for you. Tucker Carlson hasn’t actually been fired. He’s still an employee of the Fox News Channel. What happened was, Suzanne Scott called him, she’s the CEO, on Monday, morning, and said, um, he was not going to be allowed to do any more shows, and that he had been kicked out of his company email, and now they’re going to have to negotiate an exit. Um, some reporting to me, uh, suggests that she said it’s going to be an amicable parting. Right? Isn’t it?” That would be nice, but Scott’s own behavior, if Kelly’s report is accurate, makes it more unlikely.
Former Top Fox News host and insider Megyn Kelly reveals Tucker not actually FIRED from Fox yet— This is what's REALLY happening…
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 27, 2023
If Tucker Carlson was so peremptorily told that he wasn’t going to be allowed to do any more shows and couldn’t even access his company email, he couldn’t say a proper farewell either to those who watched his show or to his staff. This was an odd way for Suzanne Scott and Fox to treat their principal attraction, and it doesn’t seem likely that it would allow for a friendly separation. Of course, stranger things have happened.
And as is so often the case in incidents of the dismissal or rejection of a strong patriotic voice, it gets worse. Kelly continued that all this was “completely catching Tucker off-guard. But Tucker’s not fired. That’s my information.” This doesn’t mean that he is going to land on some new show at Fox or anywhere else on the network. It just means that he might not find it easy to go anywhere else. Kelly explained, “that he still needs to negotiate the exit and that right now he’s not free to launch a podcast or a digital show or negotiate with other employers at all, because he’s still under contract.” So Fox could conceivably muzzle Carlson and prevent him from being able to go anywhere else. The network could simply pay him to do nothing.
That would depend, however, on Fox having any funds to pay him with, and if it continues to lose viewers at the rate it’s been losing them since it deep-sixed Carlson’s show, it might find it more profitable to release him from his contract rather than silence him, whether out of spite or out of a desire to please the Leftist establishment.
Spite seems to be playing a large role in this curious case. Kelly continued, “They pulled his show off the air. They also fired his executive producer, Justin Wells. And though he tried to find out why, they wouldn’t tell him. They refused to tell him why. I mean, to me that’s so disheartening. He’s been at the — at the company for years. He’d been in the prime time for seven years and saw Fox News through one of the most difficult times in its history: the immediate era post-Roger Ailes, where they really didn’t know left from right, they didn’t know up from down. They really didn’t have strong management leading the company, and they had lost two of its biggest stars, Bill O’Reilly and me.” A bit self-aggrandizing, but nonetheless, point taken. Why were Fox executives so hostile to Carlson when they should have been grateful? That question remains unanswered.
Related: The Fox News Feud With Tucker Carlson Is About to Get Ugly
In his communication with 19FortyFive, Carlson “did not go into detail why he believes his show was cancelled. Vanity Fair published a rumor that his show got axed because Fox owner Rupert Murdoch was uncomfortable with the religiosity of his address at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary gala. Tucker Carlson told 19FortyFive that would be hard to prove.” The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, “speculated that Carlson’s internal emails unearthed due to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit sealed his fate….Carlson was livid that Fox executives refused to protect him from the blowback from the Dominion suit because he had not been a driving force in the false coverage.” The bottom line: few really know, and those who know aren’t telling, at least not yet.
Will Fox let Tucker Carlson go and establish himself elsewhere? Or will the network force him into silence for the remainder of his contract? A third possibility would be for Carlson to find some way to honor the contract while speaking out on current events at the same time. The nation is watching; it’s just not watching Fox.
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