The eminent philosopher Sylvester Stallone once observed, “There’s a natural law of karma that vindictive people, who go out of their way to hurt others, will end up broke and alone.”
Which brings us to Tucker Carlson, who was fired by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel. He is indeed vindictive and hurtful, though certainly not broke, since we’re told that Fox News will honor a contract that nets him about $20 million a year. But alone, yeah: When three million people were listening to you night after night, and suddenly nobody’s there, that might leave a guy feeling lonely.
To avoid my own karmic peril, I ought to be sympathetic. But I can’t help saying it: America is safer because Tucker Carlson will not be on television tonight. With the silencing of this guy’s malicious attacks that slyly denigrated people who aren’t like him and his dishonest support for mean conspiracy theories, we seem to have now moved a step forward on the arduous path toward recovering cherished American values – like respect for the dignity of others and a willingness to reach out to neighbors in need. But we don’t have all that much to celebrate, really.
Of course, I may be wrong. I have no sources close to Tucker and no friends at Fox. I’m just a guy who cares about journalism and its role undergirding American democracy, and who has witnessed the damage done to both journalism and democracy by those who execute Rupert Murdoch’s drive for profit and influence.
Maybe Murdoch, at 92, is beginning to note that what follows a perch at the top of the hill is over the hill – that is, that Fox’s best days are now past. If that’s so, it’s not just because Fox has given up the most-viewed figure on cable, with a likely ratings sag to follow. Carlson was unique in that he had roles both on the playing field and on the sidelines of conservative politics, simultaneously appearing as the quarterback and the cheerleading captain for the meanest team in town, the Hard-Right Demagogues. As the play caller, he showed key Republican politicians how to see and sell culturally divisive issues, and then rallied his adoring crowd on behalf of the politicians he had schooled.
Thanks to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, though, everybody who isn’t a Fox News viewer now knows about the cynical game of deception that Carlson and other Fox stars played: They touted Donald Trump’s made-up story that the 2020 election was snatched away from him by fraud, even as they privately dismissed that Big Lie as farcical and talked among themselves about Trump as a failed president who remained a burden on the conservative movement. While that’s now the most apparent of Fox’s malicious lies, it wasn’t at all unusual. It simply grew from the network’s strategy of wooing a large audience by distorting information to give conservative viewers whatever they wanted to hear.
That’s why Carlson’s departure is cause for only muted celebration by those who care about truth-telling in a democracy. Fox isn’t breaking up its affair with the airing of American malice; it’s just kicking out the guy who cost it hundreds of millions of dollars by sloppily exposing the duplicity. Somebody else will follow Tucker Carlson.
After all, right-wing demagogues have long been a staple of American media. There was Father Coughlin, whose anti-Semitic and anti-democratic rants in the 1930s drew one-fourth of the U.S. population to his weekly broadcasts. Beginning in 1952, Paul Harvey’s national radio broadcasts featured denunciations of welfare, leftists and the moral decay revealed by long hair and premarital sex. After that, the names of the titans of broadcast blather start to run together: Carl McIntire, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and, of course, Carlson’s Fox News colleagues, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham.
Many of those haven’t left the airwaves, and they won’t anytime soon. That’s because there’s always an audience eager for the rush of adrenaline that brain scientists tell us is stimulated by anger and argument – which are, of course, the fundamental programming requirements for Fox and its ilk.
But while adrenaline energizes us and makes us feel good, a word of caution is in order: An overload of adrenaline can produce tunnel vision – that is, a reduced field of vision that makes it hard to see broadly.
It's an apt metaphor for the appeal and peril of the far-right demagogues. Many people inclined by background and experience to a conservative mindset crave the rush that Fox broadcasts yield, without recognizing that their vision of the truths that lie beyond what they’re told can be shut down by the sheer pleasure of being comfortably misled. So many people have been comforted and deluded by Carlson’s diatribes, and those of others like him, that America has become a less caring and thoughtful place.
So don’t expect much to change now that Tucker Carlson is off the air. He will be replaced by another malicious maligner soon enough. And consider this: Tucker Carlson is only 53, meaning he is likely to have decades to present himself on a new platform to a receptive audience. As he tweeted just after the firing, “stay tuned.”
Some people figure he might turn to politics. Let’s see: Have any media figures successfully made that transition? Well, there was Ronald Reagan, of course, and, um, yes, Donald Trump. There were others. And, remember, we almost had ex-weathercaster Sarah Palin as our vice president, and TV doc Mehmet Oz as a U.S. senator and news anchor Kari Lake as a governor. Transitioning from the nation’s most popular TV commentator to its political leader isn’t a silly scenario to envision for Tucker Carlson.
That’s why I’m worried about the karmic force if we celebrate too eagerly the current demise of Tucker Carlson. Not only is another fabulist of the right sure to turn up in his place, but the nation might just turn its lonely eyes to Tucker Carlson, himself, as our leader. Let us hope not.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.