Rupert Murdoch has had more than a few opportunities in recent memory to kick now-former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to the curb. So what was the final straw?
According to Daily Beast senior editor Andrew Kirell, who oversees media coverage and the Daily Beast’s Confider media newsletter, it was a culmination of things. But one mistake made by Carlson stands out the most.
“I don’t know if Don Lemon's the face of CNN, but Tucker Carlson is the face of Fox News. They have hitched their wagon to him for the last however many years, they defended him in every single controversy he’s had, whether it was immigration, comments about immigration, comments about women, comments about, you name any racial minority. They’ve stuck with him and now all of a sudden they’re ditching him…,” Kirell says on this episode of The New Abnormal politics podcast.
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“It got to a point where he thought he was bigger than the network and it shows through a lot of his behavior over the last few years. But also the Dominion documents showed this guy has contempt for executives here.”
Getting rid of the face of a network may seem like a bad business move, but Kirell tells TNA co-hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy that the Murdochs may have viewed things a bit more optimistically, especially considering how the network fared after the ousters of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly.
“These are people that all thought they were bigger than Fox News,” he says.
Is Tucker the first of more departures? Kirell thinks so.
“More heads will roll,” he says.
Plus! Hosts Andy and Danielle make hilarious guesses at where Tucker and former CNN anchor Don Lemon will go next. Is a Freaky Friday switcheroo possible?
Also on this episode: Andy talks to Chris Geidner, publisher of Law Dork newsletter, who gives background on how Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas became “the bomb throwers, fire throwers on the right.”
He also shares his take on the absence of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and makes an educated guess as to how the Fifth Circuit will rule on abortion drug Mifepristone.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
