Carlson is one of the few people to find success as not only a television entertainer, but also an institution-builder - he co-founded the pioneering right-wing tabloid The Daily Caller - and a movement leader. Like his clearest intellectual predecessor, the commentator and politician Patrick J.

(Some pointed out that his fellow prime-time hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were similarly scathing in their own text messages.)Ī more interesting question, perhaps, is what Mr. Carlson was being punished for his lengthy history of inflammatory remarks on-air - if so, why now? - or for his formerly private criticisms of Fox executives. Trump’s presidency, as the New York real estate tycoon made frank nativism and seething cultural resentment the primary touchstones of conservative politics.įew seemed to believe that 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. Carlson’s rise as a populist pundit and media figure prefigured Mr. Carlson cultivated the impression that he was close to the Murdoch family and, perhaps, untouchable. Disdainful of the cable network’s top executives, Mr. The drought of premium advertisers on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” - driven away by boycotts targeting his more racist and inflammatory segments - did not seem to dent his standing within the network, so long as the audience stuck around. sanctions and blaming the conflict on American designs for expanding NATO. Carlson’s show frequently promoted the Kremlin’s point of view, attacking U.S. Carlson claimed that immigration had made America “poor and dirtier.” He seemed to shrug off his on-air popularization of a racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement,” along with revelations that he was a prodigious airer of the company’s own dirty laundry. The network stuck by him - as did Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation - after Mr. Over his years at Fox, the host had proved capable of withstanding controversy after controversy.

Carlson’s departure upended Fox’s lucrative prime-time lineup and shocked a media world far more accustomed to his remarkable staying power. Trump’s base and win back viewers who believed that his defeat was a sham. And while the exact circumstances of his departure remained hazy on Monday evening, the dismissal comes amid a series of high-stakes - and already high-priced - legal battles emanating from Fox’s postelection campaign to placate Mr.

Dirty Pleasures by Meghan March