Not too big to fail
The Wall Street Journal tells us
Tucker Carlson’s Vulgar, Offensive Messages About Colleagues Helped Seal His Fate at Fox News
Prime-time host called senior executive the c-word in redacted missive; network grew wary of further embarrassment from possible disclosure
Snappy headline and subhead.
Several weeks ago, as Fox News lawyers prepared for a courtroom showdown with Dominion Voting Systems, they presented Tucker Carlson with what they thought was good news: They had persuaded the court to redact from a legal filing the time he called a senior Fox News executive the c-word, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Carlson, Fox News’s most-watched prime-time host, wasn’t impressed. He told his colleagues that he wanted the world to know what he had said about the executive in a private message, the people said. Mr. Carlson said comments he made about former President Donald Trump—“I hate him passionately”—that were in the court documents were said during a momentary spasm of anger, while his dislike of this executive was deep and enduring.
Therefore it’s important that he call her a cunt and that it not be redacted. If you dislike a woman it’s necessary to call her a cunt and make it public and really lean into it. A woman someone dislikes=a cunt.
On Monday, Mr. Carlson’s famously combative stance toward members of Fox News management and other colleagues caught up with him, as the network abruptly announced it was parting ways with him, just minutes after informing Mr. Carlson of the change.
The private messages in which Mr. Carlson showed disregard for management and colleagues were a major factor in that decision, according to other people familiar with the matter.
Interesting. I tend to think of everyone at Fox as being as bad as each other, but (as usual) it’s not quite that simple.
With an average audience of 3.5 million viewers, Mr. Carlson’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was the network’s most-watched evening show and second-most-popular telecast overall behind the afternoon talk show “The Five.”
Which I had assumed would make him untouchable, but that isn’t that simple either. The explanation comes later in the piece.
Within Fox’s management, reservations had been mounting about risks Mr. Carlson presented for the network, people familiar with the matter said. Some of the people pointed to concerns that the populist firebrand had come to believe himself bigger than the network—a cardinal sin in Fox Corp. Chair Rupert Murdoch’s empire—and was increasingly operating as his own island.
He got too big for his britches.
Mr. Carlson sometimes trafficked in what critics—including some higher-ups within Fox—felt was thinly veiled racism on his show, such as when he recently suggested a Tennessee lawmaker got into a good college only because of his skin color, some of the people said.
That’s veiled? Thinly veiled but still veiled? I think higher-ups in more normal networks would struggle to see any veil there.
Inside Fox News, there has been a growing sense that Mr. Carlson couldn’t be managed, and viewed himself as untouchable, people familiar with the company said. Legal documents also revealed Mr. Carlson was unafraid to run roughshod over those whose views or actions he opposed.
Britches. He couldn’t squeeze into them any more. But it turns out he wasn’t as valuable to Fox as he thought.
While Mr. Carlson’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” was popular, it was also repellent to blue-chip advertisers. Top-tier marketers tend to steer clear of content they deem too controversial, and the show was sometimes the target of advertiser boycotts. As advertisers have fled prime time, some have shifted to airing commercials on Fox at other times.
Mr. Carlson’s show has filled the void mostly with ads from direct-response advertisers and MyPillow Inc. The pillow manufacturer’s commercials star CEO Mike Lindell, who has also appeared as a guest on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and was one of the most prominent people spreading the false election-fraud narrative. Direct-response advertisers typically are smaller businesses whose ads encourage people to take actions such as calling a toll-free number.
The lack of advertiser demand meant the commercials in many cases weren’t being sold at a premium or at a rate commensurate with its audience size, which meant it wasn’t providing a huge financial windfall to the network, people familiar with the network’s operations said.
Ohhhhh. All this time I’ve been assuming his popularity meant $$$. I had no idea it was all low-rent MyPillow ads. That’s hilarious.
Updating to add: I’m not the only one who balked at the “thinly veiled racism” joke.
There are many many replies saying the same thing. What “thinly veiled”????????
I suspect Hitler considered himself untouchable too. Turns out if you make yourself into too much of a problem people will go to war with you. And Fox vs Carlson is a bit like Nazi Germany vs the Soviet Union though I have no idea which is which.
Or more like Nazi Germany v Fascist Italy. Hitler & Mussolini were battling egos at all times.
“…operating as his own island…” — I wonder if this includes the Jan. 6th footage. Does Fox have it, or did Carlson take it with him? I suppose McCarthy has copies, but I wonder if Fox laid claim to any of what McCarthy gave Carlson.
I guess Tucker forgot that if you’re not the one signing the checks, you’re still just hired help.
Fox News has two major sources of revenue: advertising and cable fees.
My understanding is that the former has become more important to FNC in recent years, as advertiser concerns and customer boycotts have driven premium advertisers away from not just Carlson’s show, but much of FNC’s programming.
Cable fees are what your local cable company pays FNC for the right to include them in their cable bundles. Most cable networks aren’t like HBO, where you pay a specific fee for that network. Instead, they’re including in bundles, either the basic bundle of channels that all customers get, or a higher tier (like “the sports package” or “super deluxe movie package”) that are add-ons. (You occasionally hear about proposals to force cable companies to offer “a la carte pricing” where you get to pick and choose which channels to pay for, but I don’t think those are going anywhere.)
Those fees get negotiated every few years with each cable company as the contract comes up for renewal. There’s often a staring contest, as the cable company vows they won’t pay more, your content isn’t that valuable, and the network says if you drop us from your cable package, your subscribers will flee and you’ll lose much more revenue than if you just paid us what we’re asking.
Often you’ll even see the networks run ads telling cable customers that they’re going to lose the ability to watch their favorite shows unless they call their cable company TODAY and demand that they keep [name of network]
As you might imagine, FNC has a pretty big club in these negotiations, as they have a pretty dedicated core audience that will threaten to — and some might even carry out — cancellations of their subscriptions if they can’t watch Hannity every night. So FNC has been able to survive their loss of advertisers pretty well.
But there are apparently limits. The efforts to influence advertisers have been so successful that anti-FNC forces have been going after the cable fees. After all, while FNC may have a dedicated audience, there’s a hell of a lot of cable subscribers who not only don’t watch, but who actively resent the fact that some of their money is going to FNC. So now there’s a campaign to lobby cable companies to stop sending our money to Fox. I don’t know how successful it will be, but FNC probably senses the threat.
On a separate note: Fox management probably has not forgotten that, as popular as Carlson’s show is, he replaced a previously very popular host (Bill O’Reilly), who they fired for being too big a liability and publicity headache.
Management probably thinks, with some justification, that their platform made Carlson just as much, if not more so, than the other way around.
Perhaps his inherited money allows him to have a “so what” attitude.
I read another article that suposed that Murdoch didn’t take too kindly to a speech that Tucker recently gave. Tucker got too religious. That’s also the reason that Murdoch canceled his recent engagement. He doesn’t like evangelism.
I don’t picture Carlson having either the equipment (in his home office) or the technical chops to do his own video editing. I’m sure the Jan 6 sequences that Fox aired were edited on Fox equipment at Fox offices by Fox personnel, and I would be very surprised if Fox did not have a copy of all the video that McCarthy sent.