Tucker: The Man and His Nightmare

Photoshop courtesy of Designz R Us

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

I suppose what happened today to Tucker Carlson should've been looked upon as inevitable. He privately said one thing then went on the air and said the exact opposite. He was skeptical about the Big Lie then went on his show and promoted it, anyway. He hated Donald Trump yet sucked up to him whenever he had him on his show, including recently. Now, his former staffers are the ones dancing on hjs vocational grave.

     But this is Fox News we're talking about here, the place where truth gets sent to the slaughterhouse in the name of corporate profits.

     In a way, if one has an exceedingly, even insufferably generous, disposition, one can even feel a little sorry for Tucker. After all, he'd advanced the Big Lie and helped bring about the riot at the Capitol on January 6th because Rupert or at least his surrogates told him to. Then Rupert unceremoniously felled the axe on Tucker's well-fed neck in the name of corporate survival.

     That's a nice fat one up the bum, eh?

    Now would be a nice time to compare Tucker to his quasi namesake, Preston Tucker. Preston Tucker, of course, was the visionary behind the Tucker Torpedo, an automotive thing of beauty that Detroit thought was too far ahead of its time. Preston Tucker was the very delineation of the old phrase, "Fake it until you make it". There's that famous scene in which Tucker unveils the Torpedo for the first time. It's barely able to stand on its own wheels, an oil pan had to be placed beneath it to catch the oil that was dripping from the crankshaft. But, if you didn't look too closely, it was a scene reminiscent of Botticelli's Venus.

     Preston Tucker was no con man. He sincerely meant to change the auto industry but the industry had other plans, plans that included ruining and bankrupting him.

     Tucker Carlson is a true con man if ever there was one. No one knows what he stands for, unless one has access to his text messages as Dominion had in its successful lawsuit. But Dominion's suit was just the first brick to fall in the wall that had ably protected Carlson and his time slot. There was also Ray Epps' recent turn on 60 Minutes and, just before that, the first salvos in Abby Grossberg's own lawsuit against Fox.

    To even a mummified war horse like Murdoch, all those were bridges too far to justify keeping Tucker on the payroll. In a way, it was a risky thing to do on two fronts- Number one, Carlson had the richest real estate not only on Fox but on all of cable television. Number two, Murdoch risks the wrath of the MAGA base that still makes up a significant portion of that crucial 25-54 demographic that he and senior management feared losing to OAN and Newsmax from the time of the 2020 election.

     Now, it's all too easy to imagine Maria Bartiromo, who has the richest real estate among Fox's weekend shows, wandering in her dressing room, mouth agape as usual in confusion, wondering when she, too, will get called on the carpet. In his deposition to Dominion's attorneys, Murdoch had already proved that he was only too willing to throw Bartiromo, and Hannity, under the bus, while tacitly omitting that they lied to their viewers under the strenuous behest of people like Murdoch and his Fox CEO, Suzanne Scott, who screamed about market share.

Canceled in the USA

That was the self-pitying name that reanimated Neanderthal Danny "Bongos" Bongino chose for his show that finally became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bongino left Fox just before Carlson, advancing a cover story that he and Fox couldn't come to terms for a contract extension. In other words, "They wouldn't pay me what I was worth". In reality, Bongos' low-rated show, which, if Fox was a city, would've been, at best, given midtown if not Lower East Side status, made Fox realize they didn't need to sign him. After all, his bloated portrait was never put up on Seventh Avenue. But Bongos is trying to position himself as leaving voluntarily.

    But if Tucker can be so unceremoniously shown the door without a moment's notice, then it could happen to anyone. That includes Fox's True Believer, Maria Bartiromo, a lunatic who gave oxygen to an election-denier who actually admitted she got her electoral epiphanies from astral projection and time travel.

    Yet, what Murdoch is doing is at once hypocritical, desperate and shameless. He essentially fired Carlson for doing exactly what he was ordered to do. If Murdoch was ever interested in doing the right thing, he wouldn't have fired the head of Fox's political desk, Chris Stirewalt, after calling Arizona for Biden on Election Night, which enraged both Trump and his MAGA lunatics. After all, as Murdoch said in his deposition, he never saw "red or blue but green".

     So, yeah, like a major sports franchise in a major restructuring phase, Fox is willing to let go of its biggest talent no matter how well and reliably they bring in the advertising parishioners in the holy name of salary dumps.  And, as said, after Carlson, no one is safe from the chopping block.

    It can't even be said that Murdoch is even overly worried about losing money from settlements. The Dominion settlement represents about 28% of Fox's market cap and does little more than put a dent in its liquid capital pool (about four billion). Plus, as people with more experience in these matters tell us, a good chunk of that $787.5 million settlement will land on the American taxpayer.

    This is good old fashioned corporate fat ass-covering at its finest, dressed up as a necessary function of doing business.

     But there are no good guys in this story, so try not to look for one. Rupert Murdoch is the quintessential corporate cunt who couldn't conceive of doing the right thing unless there was a financial incentive to do so. Tucker Carlson is another type of corporate cunt who will dance like Pennywise in a Brooks Brothers suit whatever jig or waltz his boss tells him to dance. Ray Epps was at the Capitol like tens of thousands of other rioters. Abby Grossberg chose to work and to continue to work for both Bartiromo and Carlson despite being subjected to a hostile, anti-Semetic work environment. 

     And it can't be said even Dominion is the good guy here. They got four times from Fox what their own market cap was. Their goal was never to save democracy or the First Amendment but to get recompensed for whatever Fox cost them with their lies. This could have been a teaching moment, an object lesson as to what happens when a so-called news organization lies to its audience. But those idiots wanted to be lied to.

     And now, they get to defray the cost of Rupert Murdoch's settlement for being fed the lies they demanded. What a country.