Why Doesn’t Murdoch Rein in Tucker Carlson? NYT’s Jim Rutenberg Explains

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

One of the questions I hear the most, as the editor of a site covering the cable news industry, is a tricky one: Why doesn’t Fox News do anything to rein in Tucker Carlson?

Carlson’s rap sheet of journalistic miscarriages gets longer by the day. He used junk science to undermine Covid vaccines;  he repeatedly cast doubt on the 2020 election; he embraced white nationalist replacement theory; he dismissed the clearly violent Jan. 6 riot as nonviolent and a potential false flag attack. Just last week he edited out anti-Semitic comments from an interview with Kanye West in order to present the pro-Trump rapper as reasonable.

And yet, Fox News leadership has apparently done nothing to enforce standards on the prime-time host — a hands-off approach that’s unprecedented for a news network.

I put the question to someone who has a closer read on the Murdochs than almost any reporter: Jim Rutenberg, writer-at-large for The New York Times and its Sunday magazine.

Rutenberg co-wrote, alongside Times vet Jonathan Mahler, an extraordinary investigation in 2019 which examined Rupert Murdoch and the unimaginably powerful media empire he built across three continents.

That report was turned into a documentary — The Murdochs: Empire of Influence — for which Rutenberg and Mahler served as consulting producers and which is now airing Sundays at 9 p.m. on CNN.

I spoke with Rutenberg for this week’s episode of The Interview about the documentary, the incredible power of the Murdoch family, and the dramatic succession fight that will inevitably follow its patriarch’s death.

We also spoke about Fox News, the crown jewel of the family’s highly profitable American media arm, Fox Corporation.

I asked Rutenberg why he thinks the Murdochs have been so hands off when it comes to some of the more extreme and fact-challenged commentary of Tucker Carlson, one of the top-rated hosts at the network.

“As someone who’s watched them for so long, I am at times surprised that Tucker and all the personalities don’t get pulled back sometimes,” he said, recalling when the network stopped star Sean Hannity from participating in a political event back in 2010.

Rutenberg said you can blame ratings and revenues for the current approach.

“I think now it is a place where the big personalities are getting the ratings, they’re getting the revenues,” he said. “It just seems like the network wants to give people a little more room.”

Rutenberg compared the leadership style to being “the captain of a pirate ship.”

“He loves letting his pirates run loose,” Rutenberg said. “And he doesn’t love to rein people in as long as they’re delivering the results. And in Rupert Murdoch’s world, the results are bottom line dollars and cents and circulation and ratings.”

The pirate ship approach has landed Murdoch in “serious trouble” in the past, Rutenberg noted, most dangerously when the phone hacking scandal threatened to ruin his British papers.

It has also threatened his American properties.

The Fox News ship ran into dangerous waters in the aftermath of the 2020 election when, in a desperate effort to claw back viewers who had fled to outlets more sympathetic to Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, Fox News embraced those claims itself.

By airing those false claims, Fox earned itself two multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic.

Those lawsuits, which have reportedly rattled the network, “could impose some limits that seem to be lacking,” Rutenberg said. “Maybe you’ll see a little bit more, let’s say, restraint among some of the more forward-leaning personalities.”

It’s not just about ratings, however. The Murdochs like Tucker Carlson. When Rutenberg reported out his Times investigation in 2019, he found the family — particularly Rupert and his son, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch — was “pretty high on” their 8 p.m. host.

“He was smart. He was different. They liked, as I understood it, the unpredictability of his show at the time,” Rutenberg said.

“I understood at the time, too, that Lachlan was very high on Tucker,” Rutenberg added. “Tucker sort of saw that as license to do as he pleased.”

“I don’t know what the state of the art of that is right now, other than Tucker continues to do as he pleases.”

We also discussed the dramatic succession battle that Murdoch has set up for his children once he dies, why Rutenberg thinks the writers of HBO’s Succession have insider knowledge about the Murdoch family (it’s not the boar on the floor scene), and how the Times report was turned into a documentary.

Download the full episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.