Tucker A Russian Favorite was "Taken from the Airwaves" (Russian Honcho)

 

NEW YORK (AP) — The sudden ouster of popular on-air personality Tucker Carlson by Fox News prompted a panoply of reactions across the political spectrum in the U.S. and captured attention globally, punctuated by notes of concern from Russian state media and the Putin regime itself.

From the archives (March 2023): Tucker Carlson questionnaire reveals a fault line among Republicans: U.S. support for Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion

But Fox has twice fired wildly popular hosts — and both times the network recovered better than the stars it cut loose.

Fox’s dismissals of Glenn Beck in 2011 and Bill O’Reilly in 2017 offer lessons in what the post-Carlson fallout might be. Carlson was let go on Monday, less than a week after Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million for airing bogus claims of voter fraud following the 2020 election.

Fox’s two most popular programs last year — Carlson’s being one of them — were the replacements for Beck and O’Reilly.

“It seems like the parts are interchangeable,” said SiriusXM SIRI, +2.70%, and CNN WBD, +3.97% personality Michael Smerconish. “They’ve built a machine over there that seems to function even when the pistons are replaced.” 

Still, Carlson’s ability to connect with supporters of Donald Trump, the former president, and current Republican presidential candidate, could benefit him wherever he lands.

Beck was a sensation at Fox during the first term of President Barack Obama. He spun intricate conspiracy theories before it was fashionable and sparked an advertising boycott after saying Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Viewers flocked to his marginal time slot, 5 p.m. Eastern, in numbers that rivaled those of prime-time programs.

There were signs that Beck was fading when then–Fox News chief Roger Ailes cut him loose in April 2011. Ailes famously told the Associated Press at the time: “Half of the headlines say he’s been canceled. The other half say he quit. We’re pretty happy with both of them.”

Beck was hailed as an elder statesman when Carlson brought him on as a guest last month on the night Trump was indicted, where he predicted the U.S. would be at war with Russia, China, and Iraq by 2025.

Ailes replaced Beck with a panel show, “The Five,” with four conservative pundits and one liberal kicking around the stories of the day. In 2022, the show averaged 3.4 million nightly viewers — more than Beck at his peak — and was the top-rated cable news show of the year, the Nielsen company said.

O’Reilly’s “no spin zone” was essentially the face of Fox News for several years before he was fired in April 2017 following an investigation into harassment allegations.

He was replaced by Carlson, a cable-news journeyman whose grievance-based program made him the most influential voice in cable news. His ideas were echoed by many Republican politicians, and there has periodically been talk of him being a future candidate himself.

O’Reilly now hosts a podcast and Beck has the sixth-most popular radio talk show in the country, but neither has the influence they had when they were on Fox, said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine.

At Fox, the platform is king, Harrison said, not the on-air personalities.

See: What was Tucker Carlson worth to Fox News? Almost $600 million, according to Wall Street.

Fox News parent Fox Corp. FOX, +1.29% FOXA, +1.22%, and News Corp NWS, +2.31% NWSA, +2.68%, parent of MarketWatch publisher Dow Jones, share ownership.

While Fox has shed big-name hosts with little damage in the past, the ouster of Carlson comes at a precarious moment for the network, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.”

Carlson was the person there who best excelled at exciting the base of the Republican Party, she said.

Smerconish noticed the number of callers to his own talk show who said they would miss Carlson’s ability to challenge groupthink. “If Carlson now begins attacking Fox as ‘corporate media’ that despises its Trump-supporting viewers, he could cause the network to begin bleeding viewers” as it briefly did after the 2020 election, Hemmer said.

Tucker Carlson delivers a speech at the CPAC conference in Budapest last May. Carlson, like CPAC, has cultivated ties with the illiberal regime of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. SZILARD KOSZTICSAK/MTI/AP

Carlson hasn’t talked about his firing and didn’t return a query from the AP.

Carlson tightly embraced some conspiracy theories, particularly surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. His opposition to U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war received such notice that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov brought up Carlson’s firing at the United Nations on Tuesday.

 

“It’s curious news,” Lavrov said. “What is this related to? One can only guess, but clearly, the wealth of views in the American information space has suffered as a result.”

Russian state media also took notice of the stunning Fox News development, with an English-language service extending an immediate, if prospectively tongue-in-cheek job offer, and another appearing to lament that a Russian favorite was being taken off U.S. airwaves.