The development came just days after Fox News reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems—a defamation lawsuit that was expected to put Carlson on the stand. A report in Los Angeles Times citing unnamed sources claimed that the decision to boot Carlson out of Fox News came directly from Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch.
Carlson was a veteran of the two other American media brands, CNN and MSNBC, before joining Fox in 2009 as a political analyst.
Carlson was born to a world of insiders and story shapers. His father Dick Carlson was a reporter in Los Angeles and San Diego before the then-US President Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Voice of America, and the son grew up with a generation of elite Washington journalists.
“I have always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class,” Tucker Carlson said in a 2018 interview.
The 53-year-old has been described as a leading voice of “white grievance politics” and has been accused of circulating far-right ideas on race and immigration into mainstream political discourse of the United States.
As the polariser-in-chief of the American public sphere, Carlson often went off the line against the ones who did not agree with what went on on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’, his flagship primetime show on Fox News since 2013.
He once defined his own journalism fraternity as “cringing animals who are not worthy of respect”, stoking widespread ire from media persons in the United States and beyond.
Tucker Carlson: Donald Trump’s top advocate, but really?
The disclosures in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network showed that Carlson made comments privately saying that he “hated” the former US President Donald Trump, doubted his claims of 2020 presidential election fraud, and criticised Fox’s management.
But during Trump’s time in the White House (2016-2021), Carlson was seen as the highest-profile proponent of Trumpism, the power dynamics associated with Donald Trump and his Republican support base.
Carlson was often willing to criticise Trump when he saw the president deviating from his core ideology. But he remained a devout amplifier of Trumpism even at its lowest. On January 6, 2021, when Trump’s supporters, after his presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, stormed the US Capitol building in Washington DC, Carlson’s primetime fixation was described as by the publication Politico as “factually dismissive”.
ALSO WATCH | January 6 panel recommends criminal charges against Donald Trump
Carlson suggested that the January 6 Capitol insurrection was, in fact, a provocation staged by the US intelligence agencies.
While none of the flagship magazines’ ‘Person of the Year’ had Carlson on their cover, during the Trump years in White House, Carlson was nevertheless arguably the most influential person who also had the distinction of being part of Trump’s inner-circle.
How Tucker Carlson influenced Donald Trump’s presidential decisions
The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, in her 2022 book, Confidence Man, The Making Of Donald Trump And The Breaking of America, described how Carlson influenced Donald Trump’s decisions at multiple moments of reckonings in the White House, sometimes almost at the cost of implicitly blackmailing top White House officials.
Haberman describes one such meeting between Tucker Carlson and Jared Kushner, then an adviser in the Trump administration, on commutation of the prison sentence of Roger Stone, a colourful Republican operative convicted of obstruction of justice and witness tampering.
“If Trump failed to deliver (in commuting Stone’s sentence), Carlson made clear, he would press the issue publicly,” Haberman writes. Carlson soon launched a months-long on-air campaign to commute Stone’s sentence.
“What has happened to Roger Stone should never happen to anyone in this country of any political party,” Trump shared Carlson’s Fox News segment on Twitter, as he commuted his sentence months later with a presidential pardon.
What made Tucker Carlson stand out?
Tucker Carlson’s on-air devotion to the Republican idea of the United States of America has given him admirers, critics and cynics in almost equal proportions.
In a 2017 Netflix documentary Get me Roger Stone, Carlson comments on Stone’s ability to influence world events. “Is it more brilliant and impressive to influence world events or to stand on the periphery and yet get recorded as having influenced world events?… Maybe latter.”
Carlson’s run on Fox News reflected his desire to get recorded as an individual who was influencing world events, every weeknight when he went on air during primetime, with provocation-for-polarisation becoming his sole currency to garner viewers. That made, as New York Times reported in June 2021, Carlson’s old friends wonder about what he really stands for, whether he is really a racist or whether he cynically plays one on TV.
Other crucial moments, when Carlson supposedly influenced some of Trump’s decisions as president, include the cancellation of a widely-speculated military strike against Iran in 2019, and the firing of former US National Security adviser John Bolton.
Carlson was also seen as the individual from whom Trump sought approval at difficult political moments.
The Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender, in his 2022 book Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, includes a moment in which Carlson sends Trump’s calls to voicemail after the first presidential debate in 2020. When Trump finally reached Carlson, the book describes an exchange between the two men that casts Carlson in a flattering light.
“Everyone says I did a good job,” Trump tells Carlson.
“I don’t know who told you that was good,” Carlson says. “It was not good.”
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