TUCKER
By now, you’ve no doubt seen the news that Tucker Carlson and Fox News have parted ways. Since he has been yanked from the air without getting a chance to say goodbye, it’s a pretty fair assumption that he has been fired.
Proximity doesn’t necessarily prove causation, but it’s pretty hard not to connect the gargantuan Dominion settlement with this result. Lying and stoking the right wing paranoia-sphere has been Carlson’s stock in trade. For all the talk about how Fox wasn’t touched by the settlement (“It’s a tax-write-off.” “Insurance will pay for it.”) (both propositions I disagree with) somebody at Fox is thinking twice about the cost of ginning up the base with bullsh*t.
In the lead-up to World War II, Father Charles Coughlin played a similar role to Carlson. He had a widely popular radio show where he spewed anti-Semitic isolationist propaganda, attacking the Roosevelt administration for its socialist policies.
Roosevelt took the bull by the horns and in a direct effort to mute Coughlin, the federal government began to license the radio spectrum as a “natural resource.” This was a precursor to the FCC’s use of the Fairness Doctrine to regulate untempered propaganda in over the air broadcasts. It succeeded in muting Coughlin for a while. Ultimately, following Pearl Harbor, Coughlin’s fascist sympathies became increasingly unpopular and he was silenced for good when his superiors in the Catholic Church ordered him to refrain from further political commentary.
Several people have wondered why the Fairness Doctrine could not apply to Fox News. Two reasons: First, in 1987, Ronald Reagan abolished the rule on First Amendment grounds — laying bare the airwaves for people like Rush Limbaugh and dozens of other right-wing propagandists. Second, because Fox does not broadcast over the airwaves (think TV antenna), the natural resource argument does not apply to cable networks which rely solely on private infrastructure supplied by the cable providers.
But: With the Dominion slaying of the Fox dragon (Round One — with more to come) it is clear that a $787.5 Million is more than the “nothingburger” that some have suggested. Dominion found a lever that the FCC can’t use.
There will be more information about Carlson’s demise. There’s always the possibility of the kinds of personal infractions that led to the firing at Fox of Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes. We’ll have to see.
But the silencing of this liar is welcome news. And it’s real news.