Fox News Can Replace Tucker Carlson More Easily Than It Can Cover for His Reckless Behavior

Screenshot via Fox News.

Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News after a six-and-a-half year run as the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Through all of the controversies that have marred his tenure, Carlson’s ratings have remained superb. For years, he’s been the most-watched cable news host on the most-watched cable news channel, supplanting Bill O’Reilly as the face of the network in the 8:00pm ET slot.

As recently as this past week, Carlson was on a hot streak that further reinforced his unmatched ability to draw eyes and ears. So why is Fox giving their fattest cash cow the boot?

The glaringly obvious answer is the $787.5 million settlement that Fox reached with Dominion Voting Systems last week in a defamation suit pertaining to false claims made on-air in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. But the settlement itself, which had less (but not nothing) to do with Carlson’s program than it did Lou Dobbs’ and Maria Bartiromo’s, is not the proximate cause.

Carlson is not being punished for his specific role in bringing about the lawsuit; he’s been discarded because it served as a reminder of the risk that he poses.

Donald Trump’s lies about 2020 led to a cascading series of events that has now forced Fox to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump lied, and the small industry of right-of-center influencers around him constructed complex, fraudulent theories to substantiate his claims. Then Fox personalities — fearful of losing their audience — promoted both those influencers and their theories, which inevitably made villains out of innocents, including the owners, employees, and shareholders of Dominion.

No one is more prone to surveying of the depths of the online right and amplifying them with his enormous megaphone than Tucker Carlson, because no one is more afraid of losing his audience. Take, for example, his Fox Nation documentary Patriot Purge, which essentially alleged that the January 6 Capitol riot was a false-flag attack organized by the U.S. government to justify a crackdown on conservatives. Or his embrace of the anti-Covid vaccine theories. Or his visceral hatred for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Carlson’s commitment to his interests is such that he’s willing to ignore his own conscience and to his own mind, make a fool of himself in front of the camera. In his own words, Carlson hates Trump, even privately characterizing him as a “demonic force.” Yet when those comments came into the public light, Carlson executed a risible retreat (“I love Trump), and in an interview earlier this month, introduced Trump by deeming him “moderate, sensible, and wise.” Carlson mocked some of the Trump campaign’s more outlandish claims of election fraud behind closed doors, yet called for the firing of those who did the same in the town square.

At every turn, Carlson has put his own brand and personal connection with his audience above truth, yes, but more importantly to the executive suite at Fox, above the company’s interests. With the 2024 election approaching and Trump’s hat in the ring, it takes no active imagination to envision how Carlson’s tendencies could bring about a state of affairs even more tenuous than the one in 2020 that raised the profile of Fox’s right-wing competitors, sowed internal discord, and ultimately resulted in the Dominion settlement.

Moreover, despite Carlson’s prodigious talent as a performative broadcaster, he is eminently replaceable. There’s no doubt that over the short-term, Fox’s ratings may suffer. But Carlson’s own rise in O’Reilly’s wake has already shown that the network can recover from parting ways with its preeminent host. When Fox rid itself of O’Reilly in response to numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, only 17% of O’Reilly’s viewers wanted to see his show cancelled, 65% still said they had a favorable opinion of the host.

Despite their misgivings about O’Reilly’s ouster, they quickly latched onto Carlson, just as, if Fox can find the the right person, they’ll latch onto Carlson’s successor.

Carlson’s canning is lesson in risk mitigation. Fox can afford to bear the short-term opportunity costs of finding a replacement for even their top-rated host, but it could be crippled by a redux of the crises that plagued it post-2020. With 2024 looming, it decided that the juice wasn’t worth even the risk of the squeeze.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.