What is left behind by Tucker Carlson when he is shown the door

A Conversation with Murdoch about the Fox/Trump Campaign and the Phone-Hake-Scenario-Triggered News of the World

The dismissal comes amid a series of high-stakes legal battles between Fox and the Trump campaign that have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Carlson’s departure upended Fox’s lucrative prime-time lineup and shocked a media world far more accustomed to his remarkable staying power. The host had successfully defended himself during controversy over his years at Fox.

Mr. Carlson’s rise as a populist pundit and media figure prefigured Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party: His own conversion from bow-tied libertarian to vengeful populist traced the nativist insurgency that fractured and remade the party during the Obama years. But he prospered in tandem with Mr. Trump’s presidency, as the New York real estate tycoon made frank nativism and seething cultural resentment the primary touchstones of conservative politics.

In the summer of 2011, Rupert Murdoch stopped by my small office at The Wall Street Journal, where I was a columnist and editor. He had just returned from London, where he had given testimony to a committee investigating the phone hacking scandal by his British tabloids. The scandal eventually led to the closure of News of the World, which at one point was one of the biggest selling English-language newspapers in the world.

I don’t remember many specifics about the conversation — Murdoch loved to talk politics and policy with his journalists, sometimes by taking us to lunch at the Lamb’s Club in Midtown Manhattan — but I do remember the gist of what he said about the fiasco: Never put anything in an email. His private takeaway, it seemed, wasn’t to require his companies to adhere to high ethical standards. It was not to leave any trace that investigators might use for evidence against him or his family.

Jones on Infowars, Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and a “4chan to Fox to Trump pipeline”: An Insider’s View of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory

“If you had been listening to, say, Alex Jones on Infowars, you would have gotten this material, say, three months before Tucker Carlson got to it,” Hemmer said. It is showing up on Fox News, a news organization which has millions of more viewers, and has people who have not already been radicalized into these kinds of conspiracy theories. Carlson is more influential and powerful in the broader conservative movement.

“Fox News is also very sensitive to what their audience wants and what their audience is saying,” Hemmer said. “As that audience has gotten more extreme, as conservative voters and activists have moved even further to the right or have embraced conspiratorial thinking, they’ve embraced media that that give them that,” Hemmer said.

Many of the false narratives Carlson promoted were part of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, the racist fiction that non-white people are being brought into the U.S. to replace white voters.

The fringe of white nationalists used to consider the theory a fringe area. “thanks to Tucker Carlson, this kind of dreck that you wouldn’t normally see on far-right forums or online spaces had a prime time audience on cable news every night,” said Ryan, who tracks misinformation and extremists online.

“Tucker is a chameleon,” Ryan said. “He’s very good at reading the room and figuring out where the right-wing base is at and adapting to give them as much red meat as they want.”

During Donald Trump’s presidency, a “4chan to Fox to Trump pipeline” emerged, Ryan said. In one notorious example, a conspiracy theory was circulating on the anonymous message board falsely claiming South Africa was engaging in a genocide against white farmers.

She said that Tucker Carlson talked about it extensively on the air and that when Trump heard about it the United States would do something about it. “It’s sort of insane to think about this content from these forums reaching the president of the United States, and him saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to act, we’re going to do something about what is a debunked, not true conspiracy theory.'”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/25/1171800317/how-tucker-carlsons-extremist-narratives-shaped-fox-news-and-conservative-politi

Carlson and his ilk are trying to make people replace meat with insects: The Fox News perspective on “Let Them Eat Bugs”

Right-wing upstarts like Newsmax and Rumble have expanded the universe of conservative media. But unlike its newer rivals, Fox News still has the reach of a mainstream news outlet.

Carlson’s final show ended with a promotion for his latest streaming special, called, “Let Them Eat Bugs”. He claims that Carlson and his ilk are attempting to make people replace meat with insects.