More On Fox's Tucker Crisis

I never watched Tucker Carlson, I never fell for the fresh-faced preppie schtick, and the mod hairpiece always gave me a sense the guy was phony. I also have little sympathy for Fox, except to note they're in the entertainment business, and I sort of expect them to be competent at running that business, which at this point they don't seem to be.

The most recent reports say Fox's overall ratings are down 45% since whatever they did to take Carlson off the air. This makes it a corporate crisis, and that makes it worth studying for its own sake. How is Fox responding? Mostly it appears Fox's strategy is to leak dirt about Carlson to distract attention from its own bungling. But not every adult was ever a Tucker Carlson fan, so this goes only so far.

One Fox strartegy has been to tie Carlson's departure to the Dominion settlement, as well as to the Abby Grossberg suit against Fox for various sorts of discrimination. Indeed, some details of newsroom conduct from the Grossberg lawsuit are remarkably puerile, but they reflect only indirectly on Carlson hinself, whom Grossberg never met, and she never worked in the same facility with him:

Grossberg, who is Jewish, claims she was subjected to religious discrimination by a senior producer, Alex McCaskill, who had placed three inflatable Christmas decorations in the bookings area – “a preposterous display that was distracting and loud” and a smaller one by her desk with a sign that read “Hannukah bush”.

Well, I've got to say that since I didn't go to an exclusive prep school, I went instead to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, where I learned to get along with Jewish kids and had stopped telling jokes about Hannukah bushes after I was maybe 15. But theres's no evidence that Tucker was even aware of this stuff. Nevertheless, it appears that Fox is getting its own version out:

One day before the Dominion trial was set to begin and before Carlson’s ouster, Fox’s board of directors reviewed previously disclosed text messages sent by Carlson to his producer that caused the board to hatch a plan to hire a law firm to investigate Carlson, two sources told New York Times.

“It remains unclear how the text escaped more notice earlier, given that the Fox legal team was aware of it and other offensive texts written by Mr. Carlson,” the Times reported. “Mr. Carlson had even been asked about it during a deposition, according to several people who have read the unredacted transcripts of his deposition.”

. . . “After the Dominion settlement, there was clearly a meeting at the network—I don’t know if it was a board meeting or just the Murdochs, but someone made a decision—and said these two are the biggest threats to the network and they don’t listen to anyone,” the source told Breitbart News about Carlson and Dan Bongino.

The Dominion settlement, along with additional legal exposure, changed the board’s outlook on Carlson and ultimately led to his ouster. The Murdochs were rattled, sources told Breitbart News.

The whole story, which appears to be a quasi-offical version sorta-kinda but not quite coming from a board-level source, has a vague and dreamy quality. There was a deision to settle the Dominion lawsuit, which had little to do with Carlson, since he had long since distanced his own position from Sidney Powell, who was Dominion's main detractor.

However, the version somehow suggests that in fretting over Dominion, the Fox board, or maybe it was just the Murdochs, nobody's quite clear, got upset about unrelated text messages Tucker sent his producers, and apparently that got them fretting that someone else joked about a Hannukah bush, and this made the board decide Carlson had to go right after they settled the Dominon suit, or something like that.

This leaves aside the bigger question of why Fox decided to settle the Dominion suit in the first place. Alan Dershowitz has been vocal in rasing this question:

It’s a settlement that should never have happened. Dominion wasn’t hurt. It really didn’t lose any money… It’s probably making more in its lawsuits than counting votes. And it would have been very hard for them to prove any damages.

. . . the judgement itself to make a deal was not based on cost-benefit financial analysis. Something else had to have been involved. Maybe FOX was afraid of disclosure of even more dirty laundry.

So we're back to a situation where not only is nobody sure exactly what happened to Tucker and why, but it's somehow related to the Dominion settlement, except nobody knows why they did that, either. Maybe they were afraid of dirty laundry, like maybe jokes about Hannukah bushes. Yes, they're puerile, but solving that problem, if that's the problem they were trying to solve, cost Fox nearly half its prime time viewership.

And Tucker wasn't a team player. Dershowitz said in another context:

Dershowitz told "Rob Schmitt Tonight" the settlement is troubling to him because of its effect on the First Amendment — it might leave Fox inclined to self-censor for fear of further lawsuits.

. . . "I would never remain with a network that censored me," he said.

"I always express my views and was always told [by Newsmax], "be free to express your views, that's why we want you.' "

So far, Fox is simply continuing to damage its credibility with its market, who are fleeing to alternate news channels. People don't need to be Harvard Law professors to figure that out.

And the version we've been getting so far from Fox is simply the long way around what we've had from the start: nobody knows exactly what they did to Carlson or why exactly they did it. Somebody told the New York Times, very hush hush, that it might have been the Murdochs, or it might have been the board, nobody knows. What does the Times pay the reporter who wrote this?

I'm still willing to bet it was just a fit of pique from an increasingly erratic Rupert Murcoch himself, who has ainglehandedly created a corporate crisis and is likely micromanaging an utterly feckless response. dershowitz