'Just doesn't add up': Did Fox News actually fire Tucker Carlson as a distraction?

Recent reports indicated that Fox News executives were forced to fire Tucker Carlson over a racist message he sent out in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol – but not so fast, writes Jack Shafer for POLITICO.

That doesn't really make sense as a motivation to get rid of Carlson, he said, suggesting it may have been cover for a much more cynical play by Fox News because the official story of his firing "just doesn't add up."

According to the New York Times, Tucker was fired after a text message, revealed during discovery in the lawsuit against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems, in which the primetime host claimed he was disgusted by footage of three Trump supporters jumping an antifascist demonstrator because it's "not how white men fight.”

"Why should this text message 'alarm' the Fox board ... when Carlson routinely said much more inflammatory things on his program?" wrote Shafer.

"Perhaps the board has never tuned in to hear Carlson’s gems about the 'great replacement theory' or about immigrants making the country 'poorer, and dirtier and more divided' or know about his blatant white nationalist sentiments or viewed the episode in which he argued the January 6 Capitol riot was a largely peaceful demonstration.

"Perhaps board members missed these salient facts about Carlson because they don’t even own televisions. This might explain why their hair turned white when they read what was, by Carlson standards, a fairly anodyne text. But who wants to give the board this sort of slack?"

Moreover, he noted, while Carlson is the focus of a lawsuit about a toxic work environment, he was not the worst purveyor of election lies on air, with Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro pushing the conspiracy theories far more frequently.

The real reason for the firing, Shafer suggested, could be a "crisis management" strategy to drown the reporting on the $787 million Dominion settlement itself.

"If that’s the case, the strategy is working magic," wrote Shafer. "Almost nobody is talking about the shoddy journalism Fox produced to help advance the 'stolen election' lie and its lack of public contrition for the role it played in helping foment the Jan. 6 insurrection. They’re talking about Carlson’s off-camera trash talk, much of which only echoes in more profane and pungent terms what he’s said on his show or in interviews."

"The point of this inquiry isn’t to provide Carlson any relief — he deserves all the scrutiny his firing has brought him — but to examine the motives of the unnamed sources who have risen against him in recent days," wrote Shafer. "Why have so many powerful actors chosen this moment to slag Carlson, when none of the behaviors described clash with the way he’s carried on for years? One possibility is that people who are working for Fox have assembled a PR campaign to discredit the network’s former star that will throw the press pack off doing additional coverage on the Dominion case."