The departure of Carlson, Fox News' most-watched and highest-profile host, was the second seismic moment at the news channel in days. Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5m settlement to Dominion Voting Systems last week after airing election conspiracy theories.
Fox News announced the split in a terse statement on Monday: the channel and Carlson had "agreed to part ways". But the pithiness of the statement barely hinted at the dubious repercussions of Carlson's seven-year tenure as a regular host: a spell where he seemed to grow into a force that Fox News wouldn't, or couldn't, control.
"Tucker Carlson basically leaves a superhighway to the rightwing fever swamps," said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, an organisation that monitors rightwing media. "Tucker took things from what otherwise would have been considered the fringes: Infowars [a far-right conspiracy theory website], these white nationalist communities online, he took that content and laundered it into the Fox News ecosystem, and basically built up an appetite for this amongst the Fox News audience. And once they sort of got a taste for blood, that's all they wanted."
This story is from the April 28, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the April 28, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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