Network of lies, p.2
Network of Lies, page 2
But on Tuesday Fox paid big to avert the trial. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, under intensifying threat of what the testimony might do to Fox’s already battered reputation, authorized a mind-blowing $787.5 million payment to Dominion. Carlson would not have to go through the wringer of testifying—and neither would Rupert or Lachlan.
The Big Lie reckoning, however, was far from over for Fox. Another voting technology company, Smartmatic, was suing for even more money, and its case looked even stronger than Dominion’s. One of the men smeared by Carlson after the election, Ray Epps, was drawing up his own defamation suit. And the former head of booking at Carlson’s show, Abby Grossberg, was pursuing twin lawsuits against Fox, Carlson, and several members of Carlson’s production staff. Grossberg alleged a “sexist and hostile” workplace where “distaste and disdain for women infiltrated almost every workday decision.” She said Carlson made her life “a living hell.”
Grossberg’s accusation doubled as a description of a typical Tucker Carlson Tonight episode. It was Armageddon-on-the-doorstep. During this particular one week Carlson showed video of recent unrest in Chicago as evidence of “civilization unraveling” and said liberals “want race hate and violence.” He hyped antivaccination rhetoric and claimed the rest of the media shilled for Big Pharma’s “sketchy products.” He suggested that gender fluidity hastened the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult in 1997. He reiterated his long-held conspiracy theory that Democrats were importing migrants to “flood the suburbs” and force “demographic change.” And he promoted his latest streaming documentary about a globalist plan “to make you eat bugs.”
The premise of Tucker Carlson Tonight was that he had access to secret knowledge that the elites were afraid to share. It was the same pose that animated QAnon and countless other conspiracy theories. Carlson “treated his audience with contempt,” political scientist Jennifer Mercieca said, “regularly attacking their minds by convincing them that politics is war and the enemy cheats, and the whole world is out to get them.” And Carlson was their protector. The lines he rolled out were so seductive and arousing to right-wing ears:
“You are being manipulated.”
“It’s our country, not theirs.”
“It’s always about power.”
Carlson’s own claim to power was on full display. Two presidential candidates appeared on his show on consecutive nights. On Wednesday he welcomed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., hours after RFK vowed to challenge President Biden in the Democratic primary. On Thursday he invited Larry Elder, who used the platform to announce his even more long-shot bid for the Republican Party’s nomination. Elder was visibly grateful for the chance to plug himself. So many people in GOP politics—and some outside it, like RFK—coveted Carlson’s stage and jockeyed for a place on it. Aides to Ron DeSantis were feverishly working on a plan to have the Florida governor launch his presidential campaign on Carlson’s show. But in the “Tucker primary,” Trump held an early lead, notwithstanding Carlson’s private comments in 2020 about the Trump years being a “disaster”; about Trump being a “demonic force”; about how “he’s only good at destroying.”
When Dominion made those comments public, Trump got Carlson on the phone, and Carlson flattered his way back into Trump’s good graces. Within weeks they were chummier than ever, and the Fox host was at Mar-a-Lago for the first sit-down since Trump was arrested and charged with hoarding classified documents and refusing to give them back to the government. The interview was a wet kiss. Carlson called Trump “moderate, sensible, and wise.” One reviewer said “Carlson would have been better off lending Trump his studio and taking the night off.”
On Friday Carlson did the next best thing and pre-taped his 8 p.m. episode so that he could attend the Heritage festivities on time. Everyone wanted a piece of him; at the dinner table he only “got one bite of food,” Heritage’s president Kevin Roberts said, because so many well-wishers approached. Heritage, one of the country’s foremost right-wing think tanks, had played a key role in staffing the Trump White House. The organization had also given Carlson his first job out of college, a $14,000-a-year gig fact-checking and copy-editing Heritage’s policy magazine. (Was there irony in Tucker Carlson beginning his career as a fact-checker?) He was headlining this gala as a way to say thanks.
“This is far more people than live in the town that I live in,” he said when he stepped to the mic, casting himself—as was his wont—as a regular Thoreau on Walden Pond. “I haven’t been in an elevator in three years. That’s how remote my life has become.” He must have forgotten about his recent stays at the Four Seasons in Jackson Hole and the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills. (Unless he took the stairs.)
Preposterous exaggerations were par for Carlson’s course. But he came to fame as a writer, and still identified that way, mainly because of his nightly monologue, which often consumed the first ten minutes of the hour. He wrote most of it himself. His straight-to-camera essay was usually about some perceived enemy—globalism, progressivism, transgenderism, ism-ism—and why elites were allowing it to ruin the country. (No wonder Carlson wore a look of chronic dyspepsia.) He lectured others about being precise with language, about choosing the most accurate word, so throughout this book, I have chosen to take his words seriously. On Heritage’s stage, he told his fawning followers that “the country’s really going at high speed in the wrong direction” because “we have terrible people in charge.” What exactly was so unbearable? People listing their pronouns in their email signatures. He spit out the word “pronouns” with contempt. “Ridiculous,” he exclaimed.
In Carlson’s telling, corporations were bullying people into conformity. In his telling, corporate DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives were “nonsense.” In his telling, transgender rights activists cared only about castration: “Let’s sexually mutilate children,” he said, gleefully pushing the most grotesque scenario he could conjure up. His whole speech was an appeal to a narrow definition of straight white Christian conservative masculinity. “Weak husband causes angry wife,” he declared. “Weak leaders cause an angry country. That’s true.”
Carlson claimed to be sad, not angry, at this state of affairs, but that scowl affixed to his face most nights betrayed something even worse than anger. What was the root cause of his despondency? Was he just profoundly, sickly misinformed? Or was it all performative? During the speech he claimed that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said—and he made it sound as though he was quoting her—“you know what you can do to help the economy? Get an abortion.”
He proceeded to rail against this “evil” while I googled for the precise date and time Yellen might have said such an outrageous thing. She never did, of course. She never encouraged abortion. She merely pointed out, during a banking committee hearing, that “denying women access to abortion increases their odds of living in poverty or need for public assistance.” Reproductive planning enables women (and men) to plan for the future. That’s why, as she said, banning abortion “would have very damaging effects on the economy.”
Carlson could have offered a counterpoint instead of a polemic; he could have encouraged a debate. Instead he chose to lie about Yellen’s words. That made for more impact, more rage, not informed discussion. It was paradoxical, because just a few moments later, Carlson claimed “they,” the people in charge, “don’t want a debate.” When he worked at Heritage, he said, the idea was that “just because the other side was rotten didn’t mean you could be rotten.” But he had stopped applying that principle many, many years—and many, many rotten words—ago.
Carlson was not an innocent victim of the actually-fake-news age. He was a top perpetrator. He reveled in the power he’d acquired. In one aside at the Heritage gala, he said “I give any opinion I want. That’s my job. That’s why they pay me.”
Carlson, depending on his mood, could come across as a committed Fox loyalist—“I’ll die here,” he once said—or a guy just cashing a paycheck worth $20 million a year. When Fox accurately reported that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and the MAGA audience that Fox coparented with Trump took sides, mostly against the network, Carlson mused to 6 p.m. anchor Bret Baier, “I’ve got four more years here” (since his contract ran through 2024) so “I’m stuck with Fox. Got to do whatever I can to keep our numbers up and our viewers happy.”
Stuck with Fox. With a fat contract that meant Fox was stuck with him too. Carlson often maneuvered for early contract extensions, wanting as much job security as possible, and in 2023 his people (TV hosts always have “people”) claimed that he was talking to Fox about a contract that would take him all the way till 2029. The television business writ large was on the verge of collapse, with cable subscriptions dwindling and streaming ventures bleeding money, but Carlson thought he deserved a new nine-figure deal.
After Carlson finished his woe-is-us speech, he sat down with Heritage’s president for a jokey Q&A. “If things go south at Fox News, there’s always a job for you at Heritage,” Roberts said. “Well,” Carlson answered, “you’ve saved me before, so, thank you.”
It was only a throwaway line, just a note of flattery to keep the conversation moving; but it was astonishing in retrospect. Because unbeknownst to anyone in the ballroom, or in the wider world of media and politics, Fox News had already pulled the pin on a genuine bombshell.
It had decided to fire its most popular host.
* * *
“If things go south at Fox News” was an abstraction to Carlson, a distraction, as he flew back home to Gasparilla Island, a barrier island in southwest Florida where he owned adjoining homes. He had signed off on Friday by saying “we’ll see you Monday” and he had sketched out an opening monologue for Monday night that advanced a January 6 conspiracy theory. For all of his theatrical shock about society’s decay, his sorrow, his rending of garments, he was personally at peace. He wanted to be surrounded by wood and wool and trees and animals, so he was. No drywall, no DEI seminars, definitely no droning executives. Get him spun up about HR departments and he would get vulgar in a hurry. But he was far removed from all that. He lived six months a year in the tarpon-fishing capital of the world. Minutes before airtime, he drove a golf cart less than a mile to the Gasparilla Inn & Club resort, where his Florida studio was headquartered. He sometimes let locals watch the broadcast from the back of the room. His life was arranged exactly as he wanted it to be. Thus he was 1,000 percent caught off guard when, at about 11:15 a.m. on Monday, April 24, Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott called to tell him he himself had been yanked from the sea.
“We’re taking you off the air,” she said.
To Carlson, it was like somebody canceling Taylor Swift mid-tour, or removing The Crown from Netflix before anyone could stream the ending. It was, in effect, a public execution, because Carlson was being stripped of his powers, his mic, his gilded soapbox, and he was unable to do anything about it. He was not offered a final month or a final week or a final day. He wasn’t given a path to sign off and pretend like it was on his terms. There would be no final soliloquy. There would just be a statement, a pithy but pitiless string of words, sent by Fox News PR to the media reporters Carlson once derided as “self-righteous muppets.”
I was one of those muppets. Having been fired from CNN just eight months earlier, after a nearly decade-long run hosting the network’s Reliable Sources program, I thought I knew what he might be feeling. A new management regime decided to cancel my show, thereby subjecting me to “pay or play,” a form of purgatory that I learned about when I signed my first TV contract. With “pay or play,” networks don’t have to play you—put your mug on TV—as long as they pay you.
At CNN, I had an inkling that Reliable was on the chopping block, and even crafted a memo trying to defend the show, citing its high ratings and low production costs. By the time I got called in to the CEO’s office, I knew what the meeting was about. I wasn’t told why the show was finished, but I was offered a chance to announce the cancellation on my own terms and anchor a final broadcast. Why? Because there was mutual respect. I had known the exec who fired me, and his boss, and their spouses, and their PR people, for more than a decade. I trusted they wouldn’t trash me on the way out and they trusted I wouldn’t light a match on their air.
Carlson, by contrast, was a pyromaniac. There was no trust at all between Carlson and Scott, in either direction, and I’ll show you why.
“She’s a cunt”
During that brief Monday morning phone call, Scott did offer Carlson one thing—not a final show, or control over the timing of the newsbreak, but the chance to include his own comment in the press release. For a moment, Carlson thought about saying yes; maybe he did want the breakup to sound truly mutual and mutually beneficial. But he quickly snapped out of that. He was dumped and he wanted everyone else to know it too. He wrote a farewell email to his staff at 11:27 a.m. The news erupted at 11:28. “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways,” the announcement said, glaringly lacking any quote from him. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”
Carlson’s production team was not given a heads-up, so they found out the same way as everyone else, through smartphone news alerts or texts from friends. Within minutes, they learned that their boss, senior executive producer Justin Wells, was also ash-canned, but the rest of the staff was supposed to stay at their keyboards and whip up a replacement show that very night.
While the other cable newsers began wall-to-wall coverage of Carlson’s ouster and what it meant for the Republican Party, Harris Faulkner, the anchor of Fox’s 11 a.m. hour, gingerly told viewers that Carlson and the network “mutually” decided to split up. “Mutually” was just another Fox lie. Not a single soul believed it. (I later heard that the wrong script was loaded into the teleprompter for Faulkner to read.)
Inside the network, theories about Carlson’s sacking sprouted like ragweed. One of his producers thought the cancellation was tied to the Dominion settlement. Another producer thought it was triggered by Grossberg’s lawsuits. A third wondered if it was related to Ray Epps’s interview on 60 Minutes the night before, when Epps said Carlson was “going to any means possible to destroy my life.”
Whatever had happened, it happened fast, or so it seemed. The press release said that different hosts would fill in at eight o’clock on the amorphously named Fox News Tonight. The fact that Fox had no firm plan for the time slot—no splashy outside hire, no new graphics, no innovative new format—betrayed how suddenly and sloppily Carlson had been terminated and added to the shock value. Donald Trump Jr. said it was “actually mind-blowing.” His dad felt the same way. “I’m surprised,” the former president said. “He’s a very good person, a very good man and very talented, and he had very high ratings.”
Some of Carlson’s staffers were not as surprised to be visiting the guillotine as the outside world was. “It was always going to end badly,” one of my sources at the show said. “We knew we were burning too bright.” They pushed the envelope far past the point of a paper cut.
The royal “we” was something Carlson always used. He portrayed his production team—and only his team—as a force for good in the battle against the evils he presumed nightly. His entire show was about “us” versus “them,” and this approach extended to the rest of Fox, where Tucker Carlson Tonight had the appearance of a rogue unit. According to Grossberg’s lawsuit alleging harassment and a toxic workplace, the bro-fest environment was antagonistic toward other Fox shows, including Maria Bartiromo’s, where she had worked before. Grossberg said she was hauled into Wells’s office in her first week on the job and asked, “Is Maria Bartiromo fucking Kevin McCarthy?” (No, she said.)
Carlson’s producers and writers were more loyal to him than to Fox as a network. Sometimes known as the “Tuckertroop,” which was the show’s in-house email alias, they were a saboteur squad of true believers, regarding the mothership as almost enemy territory, since as a Fortune 500 company, Fox Corp had policies in place promoting diversity and supporting transgender employees—the very types of things Carlson railed against on air. Of course, Carlson always genuflected to Fox in public, praising the network for letting him “say what we think is true.” (There’s the word “we” again.) “They tell you not to say things that are incorrect,” he said. “They tell you not to be irresponsible. To try to use decorum and good taste and all that.” Then “they leave you alone.” Carlson intimated that this level of autonomy was impossibly rare in television, when in my experience, it’s rather common. I was more intrigued by Carlson’s claim that Fox wanted him to be correct and responsible, since his show only worked because it was the exact opposite.
Carlson’s expressions of gratitude to Fox didn’t fool management because they knew how he acted in private. The man was so resistant to feedback, so defiant of supervision, that he used to drive his Volvo without wearing a seat belt. “I have to wear it? It’s insane!” he once said to a reporter. “I’m pro seat belt in the abstract; I just can’t rise above the authority issue.”
In his prime-time era, Carlson always specified that he worked for the Murdochs, which was a way to elevate his standing and diminish what the org chart said: that his opinion show, like all the others, reported up through executive vice president Meade Cooper to Scott, who was a rare female CEO in the male-dominated TV business. According to sources on the staff, Carlson shit-talked both women as well as his #1 enemy within Fox News, the entrenched public relations boss Irena Briganti, whom he called a “cunt.”
