As I pointed out here, Bill O’Reilly claimed this week that the biggest factor in Fox News‘ decision to fire Tucker Carlson was a pending lawsuit brought by a former booker for his show who had copied a bunch of tapes in which Carlson and his staff made offensive and anti-Semitic comments. Those tapes are still out there and are likely to be leaked to the media at some point as a part of Abby Grossberg’s effort to get a settlement out of Fox News.
But today both the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times have reported there was another factor in the decision. Just prior to the settlement with Dominion, Fox executives noticed several text messages Carlson had sent. Those messages were redacted for the pending trial and somehow the executives hadn’t really paid attention to them.
Despite the fact that Fox’s trial lawyers had these messages for months, the board and some senior executives were now learning about their details for the first time, setting off a crisis at the highest level of the company, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions…
Several people with knowledge of Fox’s discussions said the redacted messages were a catalyst for one of the most momentous decisions Fox and its leaders — the father-son team of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch — had made in years: to sever ties with the host of their highest-rated and highly profitable prime-time program and a face of the network in the Trump era…
One person briefed on the contents of the redacted material said one of the messages was particularly offensive, adding to the concern at the top of the company. The Times has not seen the contents of the message.
The Times doesn’t say what was in the really offensive message but there were two other instances where, according the WSJ, he used the C-word to describe a senior executive at Fox and also attorney Sidney Powell.
Several weeks ago, as Fox News lawyers prepared for a courtroom showdown with Dominion Voting Systems, they presented Tucker Carlson with what they thought was good news: They had persuaded the court to redact from a legal filing the time he called a senior Fox News executive the c-word, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Carlson, Fox News’s most-watched prime-time host, wasn’t impressed. He told his colleagues that he wanted the world to know what he had said about the executive in a private message, the people said. Mr. Carlson said comments he made about former President Donald Trump—“I hate him passionately”—that were in the court documents were said during a momentary spasm of anger, while his dislike of this executive was deep and enduring.
Generally speaking, harsh language from people in the news business probably doesn’t qualify as news. However, other news outlets were working to get hold of those redacted messages and might have done so eventually. Add that to the 90 or so videos of Carlson’s staff making offensive and allegedly anti-Semitic comments and you can see how this would very easily turn into a week-long storm of condemnation from every national news outlet.
Maybe Fox News would have been willing to fight that fight under ordinary circumstances but they just lost an $800 million judgment and are about to face another, similar lawsuit from Smartmatic in which they could lose even more. With potentially $2-3 billion in payouts coming (reduced substantially by insurance) O’Reilly predicted they’d be cutting salaries and would need to layoff staff in the next six months. It sounds like Fox just they decided they didn’t want to fight a PR battle over Carlson’s comments on top of everything else. By firing him they get ahead of those unreleased tapes and texts and, if they do come out, they can just claim it’s old news.
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