How did it come to this? Fox News and its longtime prime-time star at loggerheads as Tucker Carlson broadcasts on Twitter from a barn in Maine while the network that fired him demands he cease and desist.
“We’re at the two-month mark since Carlson’s last show, which he didn’t know was his last show. It’s striking that there’s no resolution even close to being in sight,” said Brian Stelter, once host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, now writing a second book about Rupert Murdoch’s media giant, Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump and the Battle for American Democracy.
Carlson was fired on 24 April, in the aftermath of Fox’s $787.5m settlement of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit regarding the broadcast of Trump’s lies about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden. Fox and Dominion have said Carlson’s firing was not related to the settlement. The reason remains unknown.
This month, Carlson debuted Tucker on Twitter. By Twitter’s count, that first 10-minute, conspiracy-laced monologue has been viewed nearly 120m times. Four episodes have followed, addressing Trump’s federal arraignment; attacking Biden; and ridiculing US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
But Carlson remains under contract to Fox. A cease-and-desist letter was sent, Carlson’s lawyers responding with defiance.
Representatives of Fox and Carlson declined to comment.
Stelter said: “Both sides have hinted they have weapons, but neither side has fired. They both sent legal letters but neither side has filed a lawsuit. Both sides have made noise about breach-of-contract claims but not made them officially, publicly. So I think … Tucker and Fox are in a staring contest. And it could go on for a long time.”
If so, it seems set to play out to a backdrop of steadily diminishing returns for both Carlson and Fox.
Fox has struggled to fill a hole in its primetime schedule as guest hosts try to replicate or replace Carlson’s blend of preppy ties and hard-right invective. But on Twitter, viewer numbers have fallen for Carlson too. Carlson’s most recent episode, on Hunter Biden’s plea deal on tax and gun charges, attracted fewer than 15m views.
Stelter said: “I think it’s very clear that Fox would like to keep him off the air … for as long as they contractually can. That is not always how these things go. There’s often a compromise between network and talent. Instead of being benched for two years, he might accept one year. But I think from the tea-leaf reading, Fox wants him benched for the entire rest of the contract.”
Stelter left CNN last August. He is “trying to avoid talking about my own situation. But I know this firsthand. There’s a long history in TV news of anchors being put on the proverbial bench. It’s called pay or play. A network [doesn’t] have to play you, it can choose to just pay. [In Carlson’s case], they are paying him but they don’t have to play him.
“But because Fox is being Fox, it has been secretive about the Carlson firing since the day it was announced … [and] that has created this vacuum that remains and Tucker has tried to fill it. And that has created, I think, some distrust among the Fox audience toward Fox.”
Shouting ‘Censorship!’
Publicly, Carlson’s lawyers have chosen aggression. Slamming “the most catastrophic programming decision in the history of cable news”, the attorney Harmeet Dhillon said: “Tucker will not be silenced by anyone.”
According to the New York Times, in quieter talks Carlson’s lawyers have argued “that Fox News breached its contract with Carlson first, in part by failing to prevent his private messages from being disclosed” in the Dominion case.
Carlson’s messages have certainly caused embarrassment. In one, he said he hated Trump “passionately”. In others, he reportedly used misogynistic and racist language.
Citing “a person with knowledge of Carlson’s legal strategy”, the Times added: “The former Fox host also believes his Twitter show is protected speech under the first amendment.”
Few experts – or media sources – agree. For Bloomberg, under the headline Tucker Carlson’s Fox defense crumbled when he took millions, the Yale law professor Stephen L Carter discussed the nature of non-compete clauses.
“I have no dog in this fight,” Carter wrote, “but whatever the answer, the first amendment has nothing to do with it.”
Stelter said: “I see why Tucker and [attorney] Bryan Freedman are making that argument. But let’s just say the first amendment applies to a person’s relationship with government, not with an employer. So I think when Tucker’s camp bring up the first amendment, it’s a rhetorical argument. It’s the way of shouting, ‘Censorship!’ But television contracts give a network every right to silence an employee.”
In other words, Carlson’s first amendment defence may well be every bit as calculated as his voicing of far-right views, his flirtations with QAnon and other conspiracy theories and all the other controversies he now seeks to stoke on Twitter.
“The way I perceive Tucker’s legal strategy is to publicly embarrass Fox,” Stelter said. “To make this more painful, as opposed to trying to win in a courtroom, if it ever gets that far. Right now, I doubt it will even get to arbitration. By invoking Dominion, I think Tucker’s camp is trying to make this more embarrassing for Fox, to reopen a vault Fox just paid a lot of money to close … they’re trying to stir up more trouble.
“We don’t have insight into whether or how the negotiations are going for an exit deal. But Dominion was the strongest card Tucker could play. So he played it.”
For Puck, the media reporter Dylan Byers this week considered Carlson’s attempt to stir trouble and why it might well fail. The Dominion settlement, Byers said, “showed the punitive costs of following Trump’s base too far into the fever swamps”.
The “unmanageable embrace of raw nativism, conspiratorial thinking and anti-Ukraine rhetoric … proved untenable for Fox’s reputation with establishment conservatives and advertisers, even if it juiced the ratings. No matter how much the Murdochs pined for the pro-Trump audience in those chaotic days following the 2020 election, they seem to have come to the conclusion that nothing is worth the risk of a return to Delaware superior court.”
Contractual arguments
There is another factor in play: Carlson has not joined a competitor to Fox in the traditional sense of the word.
Stelter said: “Historically, television news contracts have defined their competitors as only other television networks. In the past, Fox News contracts have really just listed CNN and MSNBC and maybe Newsmax as competitors.
“It’s an antiquated way of viewing the media environment. And I believe Tucker has one of those contracts that does not list Twitter as a rival when in fact Twitter is now a rival. Not in the cable fee business but in the ad business, certainly in the war for attention.
“So he may have a little bit of an edge just on that narrow contractual argument. ‘Well, the word Twitter, is it in my contract?’ There is a legal argument to be made.
“But you could certainly make a strong case in answer that anything broadcast, any video streaming on the internet, is a competitor of Fox.”
The trial by TV continues.
