Rod “Live Not By Lies” Dreher has shared the following anecdote many times, but it’s especially interesting that he used it, once again, in this Substack post: “Tucker Fired Because Of Religion.”
I am using it to open this podcast post because this week’s “Crossroads” discussion (CLICK HERE to tune that in) isn’t really about Tucker Carlson’s forced exit from Fox News — it’s about whether Carlson was a very good fit with the Fox News political and cultural worldview in the first place.
My theory is that Carlson is a conservative populist — as opposed to being a D.C. Beltway Republican — and that his religious beliefs (especially after he stopped drinking) are part of that mix. This created tension with the dominant Fox News management culture, which is rooted in the Page 3 Libertarian Republican beliefs of titan Rupert Murdoch and the network’s original mastermind, the now disgraced Roger Ailes.
This brings me back to Dreher’s anecdote:
I have long wondered why Fox News doesn’t have much religious reporting, or cover things including a religious angle, even though many of their loyal viewers are religious. Now I know. And you should know too. You might recall my telling the story about how the freelancers Fox hired to cover the 2002 Catholic bishops’ meeting in Dallas, the first one after the scandal broke, asked me to brief them on who the players were, and what the issues were. They took copious notes, but when I told them about the homosexual clerical networks, and their roles in the scandal, they told me to stop. “Orders from the top of the network: stay away from that stuff,” I was told. I told them that you couldn’t understand the scandal without that factor. Maybe so, they said, but we are ordered not to touch it.
Thus, Dreher argues that Carlson’s forced exit should open the eyes of Fox News-hooked religious and cultural conservatives.
Whatever Rupert Murdoch’s internal motivations, the fact is — well, to be precise, what I confidently believe to be the truth — that Tucker Carlson gave an extraordinary speech about the theological aspect of the cultural crisis we are enduring. He talked bluntly, to an audience at Washington’s leading conservative think tank, about the fundamentally spiritual nature of the fights we’re in. And he encouraged his audience to pray for our country.
Several days later, he was fired.
Is this part of a larger, older story?
As you would expect, this brings us to the much-discussed Vanity Fair feature that ran with a headline proclaiming, “Tucker Carlson’s Prayer Talk May Have Led to Fox News Ouster: “That Stuff Freaks Rupert Out.”
Yes, by all means note the presence of the dangerous words “may have” in that headline. There are all kinds of theories about the Carlson exit and the God-talk angle is only one of them. Hold that thought, because we will return to the claims in a major New York Times story — which seems to have lots of info from Fox News leaders.
The key to the Vanity Fair story, in my opinion, is that reporter Gabriel Sherman’s work appears to be rooted in a source from his ongoing research about Rupert Murdoch, as opposed to new reporting about Carlson.
This brings us to two crucial passages in the online article at Vanity Fair (which is not known as a Religious Right publication):
According to the source, Fox Corp. chair Rupert Murdoch removed Carlson over remarks Carlson made during a speech at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary gala on Friday night. Carlson laced his speech with religious overtones that even Murdoch found too extreme, the source, who was briefed on Murdoch’s decision-making, said.
Carlson told the Heritage audience that national politics has become a manichean battle between “good” and “evil.” Carlson said that people advocating for transgender rights and DEI programs want to destroy America and they could not be persuaded with facts. “We should say that and stop engaging in these totally fraudulent debates…I’ve tried. That doesn’t work,” he said. The answer, Carlson suggested, was prayer. “I have concluded it might be worth taking just 10 minutes out of your busy schedule to say a prayer for the future, and I hope you will,” he said. “That stuff freaks Rupert out. He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk,” the source said.
Let’s jump down a few lines to this:
Rupert Murdoch was perhaps unnerved by Carlson’s messianism because it echoed the end-times worldview of Murdoch’s ex-fiancée Ann Lesley Smith, the source said. In my May cover story, I reported that Murdoch and Smith called off their two-week engagement because Smith had told people Carlson was “a messenger from God.” Murdoch had seen Carlson and Smith discuss religion firsthand. In late March, Carlson had dinner at Murdoch’s Bel Air vineyard with Murdoch and Smith, according to the source. During dinner, Smith pulled out a bible and started reading passages from the Book of Exodus, the source said. “Rupert just sat there and stared,” the source said. A few days after the dinner, Murdoch and Smith called off the wedding. By taking Carlson off the air, Murdoch was also taking away his ex’s favorite show.
Smith did not respond to a request for comment.
The 92-year-old mogul’s broken engagement is part of a string of erratic decisions he has made of late that raises questions about Murdoch’s leadership of his media empire.
As Dreher noted (and I have my own reasons for agreeing), Fox News has never seemed all that interested in doing journalism work — as opposed to punching the occasional “War on Christmas” culture wars button — about news events and trends linked to religion, cultural and moral beliefs and questions.
Much like the late Rush Limbaugh, another Libertarian superstar in the Bill O’Reilly mold, the leaders at Fox News have to be sitting on mountains of audience research noting the huge role that conservative religious believers have played in their success. But that doesn’t mean that Fox News leaders, at the highest possible levels, believe that religious faith is all that important.
You could make a case that Murdoch and his core disciples are about as comfortable with conservative forms of religious faith as, well, lifestyle liberal folks at Rolling Stone (“What the Hell? Satan Fired Tucker Carlson, Right-Wing Christians Say”).
All that said, it is — of course — important to dig into that major New York Times piece that ran with this headline, “On Eve of Trial, Discovery of Carlson Texts Set Off Crisis Atop Fox.”
The theory here, which is totally plausible, is that Carlson’s exit was in part part caused by evidence that emerged in prep-work for the lawsuits linked to Fox News commentaries about rumored fraud linked to Dominion voting machines.
Read the following very carefully:
It is notable that even when compared with the extreme rhetoric Mr. Carlson was allowed to use on air, the messages released publicly had the ability to shock. In one, he referred to the lawyer Sidney Powell, a major proponent of the debunked theory that the Dominion machines switched votes, with a crude and misogynistic slur. Amid the cache of redacted messages was one in which he used a similar vulgarity to describe a senior Fox News executive, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
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.
Dominion lawyers planned to press the judge about using the contents of the redacted messages in their questioning of Mr. Carlson. The lawyers prepped dozens of potential questions for the host, along with hypothetical rejoinders they thought Mr. Carlson might use to deflect the toughest of them. And they planned to pin him down on the ones that were most demeaning toward women.
Anyone who knows anything about Carlson knows that his sense of humor — this is common in newsrooms, I have found — is blunt and at times nasty. However, it appears that accusations against Carlson focus on language, as opposed to the abusive sexual behavior seen in earlier Fox News scandals. It will be important to see what other on-the-record information emerges.
Back to the Times: It’s interesting to note that Carlson was furious with (a) a Fox News executive and (b) one of the siren voices in the stolen-election conspiracy theory choir at the heart of the lawsuit. Carlson had denounced Powell on the air for producing zero evidence to support her claims (video embedded here).
What will happen now? Fox News pushed Carlson off the air, but did not toss out his contract — wanting to prevent him from switching to another competitive platform. That issue will almost certainly end up in court and the evidence that surfaces will be both brutal and fascinating. Fox News executives love to trash superstars that they have forced out the door.
Meanwhile, Carlson released a Twitter video that had 70 million viewers, last time I checked, roughly 10-plus times the numbers of the show that Fox News as quickly subbed for his now-dead program. Carlson recently interviewed Elon Musk. Think about that potential partnership.
Stay tuned. It’s hard to imagine Carlson remaining silent (#DUH).
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.
FIRST IMAGE: Fox News screen shot from a Baptist News Global feature on Tucker Carlson attacks on religious conservatives who he sees as “woke.”