To me, a then-unreformed doom-scroller, Donald Trump’s 2021 ejection from Twitter was like the cessation of an airhorn that had been blowing in my face for five years straight. Tucker Carlson getting shit-canned by Fox News was a JV version of that phenomenon.
According to several outlets, including Vanity Fair, Carlson is anxious to get back into the wingnut media mix, but first he has to get out of his contract with Fox News, and they have no incentive to play ball since there’s every reason to believe he’ll torch them from a new perch:
“Carlson is preparing to unleash allies to attack Fox News in an effort to bully the network into letting him work for—or start—a right-wing rival,” Axios reported Sunday, citing a “close Carlson friend” who said that while the ex-Fox host initially said he wanted to be “quiet and clean” in negotiating his exit with Fox, “Now, we’re going from peacetime to Defcon 1. His team is preparing for war. He wants his freedom.”…
Carlson’s current contract expires in January 2025, after the presidential election; to get back on the air before then, he “needs Fox News to agree to a deal that would allow him to work elsewhere,” the New York Times reported, noting that such a deal “could require him to forfeit millions of dollars he is owed by the network.”
Rolling Stone reports that Carlson’s ouster may have resulted from his decision to try to get the network’s PR chief, Irina Briganti, a holdover from the Roger Ailes days, fired.
In pleading his case, Carlson argued Briganti spent too much time badgering on-air talent and the channel’s personnel; that she was generally incompetent and mean-spirited; and that she regularly engaged in dirty tricks against him and other hosts and contributors, when her job was ostensibly to protect them. One current Fox source with knowledge of the matter described the Carlson-Briganti feud as an intra-network “death match.”…
Word of Carlson’s attempt to get her fired got back to Briganti, exacerbating an already terrible relationship. Briganti “hates all the talent,” the former Fox News commentator says. “She was so disgusted by the level of fucked up idiots who work there, in her opinion, and had to clean up their messes and their overblown egos.”
I assume Briganti is an awful person since she’s the head PR flack at Fox News. But her disgust with the “fucked up idiots who work” at the network is certainly relatable. Anyhoo, I hope the Murdoch scumbags exercise every prerogative to keep the human boat shoe muzzled until January 2025 — and that their respective “teams” drop bombshell after bombshell on each other for the next 18 months.
Open thread.