PHANTOM PAIN: 2 Months After The Cancellation of Tucker Carlson Tonight
The public still lacks the media and legal forensics to understand what is happening at FOX News. One thing is sure. No one trusts the way the program was suddenly cancelled.
If you listen to modern media, there seems to be a majority percentage you will not get the whole story and you will be emotionally manipulated in the churn of the news cycle. You will miss important news in the daily toss of people trying to sabotage our society for personal gain. To remain emotionally objective about anything of significance is becoming very tough work requiring both a very high knowledge base of public affairs tactics and intuition.
Of what we know of trust, we simply know what we don’t trust.
THE STRANGE CASE OF TUCKER CARLSON
No one really trusted the way Tucker Carlson was ejected from FOX News. Other network casualties followed, including the cancellation of Kennedy, perhaps the only prime time Libertarian show on cable television. Don Lemon was also booted. There is the mystery of “three” to add to the speculation pile of cancelled programming lore.
In the days leading to the anchor’s involuntary release from programming and reshuffle of FOX’s entire news lineup all the public had to grasp was speculation. The very opacity around reasons for his firing made the public completely distrust it. Had some kind of extreme spook power play occurred? It is really the way the prime time program was cold scrapped that demonstrated to the entire world this was a duress move exacted with a sense of urgency.
We could look at suspects in this whodunnit mystery.
It could have been simple competition. Maybe Tucker’s growth in popular ratings was dominating the news and advertising central space for influence at Fox. It could have been a back room deals to follow the network’s settlement with Dominion electronic voting systems. It could have been his new third-rail documentary series line-up attacking World Economic Forum priorities, the election infiltration of Canada’s government by Chinese influence peddling. Maybe it was subversive political blowback for unpacking the legal case of Burisma and Chinese influence peddling corruption by President Biden and his family. It could have been Blackrock, who became a target of the program for ESG sanctions on Western farms through corporate financial scoring, leveraged its stakes as a shareholder and ad revenue builds to ouster the polemic. Perhaps it was the sacrosanct competitive use of footage leading to the release of innocent Jacob Chansley, proven to be politically imprisoned, attributed to January 6th events in D.C.
He made a lot of powerful enemies, as journalists often do.
WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
Two months later people are still searching for answers why FOX, enjoying a moment of popular geniality and moral wins for conservatives, would suddenly fire their top draw. Many felt Tucker Carlson Tonight was carrying the network. At least thirty percent of the viewership is expected to never return.
Schadenfreudes are now clamoring Tucker needs Fox more than Fox needed Tucker, in a Media-ite Op-Ed recirculated by Ben Domenech. Domenech received criticism on Tucker Carlson Tonight in a montage painting him as a pinch hitter for neocons who want the US to back a proxy war in Ukraine. So, not everyone at the network feels bad the program is gone, but may be under a thin veil of admission that it would have been better for everyone if he had stayed.
Meanwhile, Carlson is taking interviews from the press. His friends and colleagues are trying to tread a careful balance of staying employed and relevant as TV news production sources and loyalty to Tucker’s brand. Typically, remaining staff at networks are advised to give the silent treatment to oustered anchors or be subject to termination themselves. This is a standard procedure for TV news networks who hard boot an anchor. So they cannot take a professional booking with him or ask him for coverage either.
The people at Breitbart are under no such order. Some caught between Fox and a hard end envy their independence as media pirates. There are conservative counter bids to boycott FOX news by colleagues allied with Tucker’s ideological lane of programming.
Some of Tucker’s allies are forced to make hard strategic decisions. These are whether to make no news with Fox or just strategic news with some network programs to stay relevant and survive. Tucker’s biographer, Chadwick Moore, didn’t make the cut. Nor did the majority of Tucker’s staff. Some Fox staff continue to defect months after the axe dropped. Others, like Glenn Greewald, are throwing analysis over the nighttime fence to Laura Ingraham, obeying the one cardinal rule. Stay on teevee.
There is talk that Tucker is campaigning for funds to start his own network. He clearly has the support of other news anchors who have left both CNN and Fox such as, Megyn Kelley.
Some former regulars on his program seem adrift without the raft of programming he provided to cover censored or taboo third rail programming: the anti-war perspective, COVID-19 medical mandates, UFOs, the debate on mental health and gender, buried coverage of ecological disaster in a small Ohio town. This would typically be reserved for Gen-Xers surfing the Internet for more news and information corporate legal vigils would clap down.
What do we do now? Viewers stay alert and keep watch for signs of relief, reconcilliation or for the real competition to emerge. Clearly, there are over six months left of this public media conflict. We just have to ride it out and see what clears.