Brian Stelter cuts through the fog
“Carlson repulsed large swaths of the company he worked for.” Strip away the rumors and conspiracy theories. Tucker Carlson’s relationship with Fox News ended like most bad relationships, says Brian Stelter (Vanity Fair):
Let’s step away from the conspiracy cliff. Carlson was not a victim of the settlement. But Dominion did deserve credit for dragging some of Carlson’s intolerability out in the open. “It’s one thing to know about abusive language and angry emails. It’s another thing to have it all read back to you during a deposition,” a source observed. And to have the Fox board retain lawyers to read through his deepest, darkest texts. “People were telling Rupert and Lachlan, ‘This guy is not worth it,’ ” an insider said. That’s why Dominion’s wins were a tipping point, even though Carlson’s termination was not part of the settlement. So why was he removed, and what does it reveal about the network of lies?
Think, for just a moment, about the worst relationship in your past—and why it ended. Odds are, there wasn’t just one reason, it wasn’t one thing, it was everything: a book’s worth of fights and slights and resentments and grievances. Maybe there was a final indignity—an affair, a betrayal, the discovery of a derogatory text—but even if one party was blindsided, the other could list a dozen long-gestating reasons for the breakup. That’s why Fox dropped Carlson. It wasn’t one thing. It was everything.
The excerpt is adapted from Stelter’s upcoming Network of Lies. If you write about media figures for a living, I guess you have to do it. Hats off to Stelter for wasting breath and electrons on Tucker Carlson. I wouldn’t.
It was a tale as old as TV. Stardom is a potent and often destructive drug. Icarus flew too close to the sun; he got his wings melted. Carlson flapped away, higher and higher, until one day the Murdochs just couldn’t tolerate his flapping anymore. “He got too big for his boots,” Rupert told at least one confidant.