Fox booting Tucker Carlson is the best news conservatives have gotten in years | Opinion

It’s hard to be shocked to hear that Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ biggest star, was shown the door Monday. “We want to thank Tucker Carlson for his service to the network,” announced newscaster Harris Faulkner (who got her news sea legs in Kansas City on WDAF).

In the journalism business, it’s a bit odd for a supposedly neutral news anchor to make a statement of corporate gratitude on behalf of her employer — but Fox News has never really pretended to aspire to its original “fair and balanced” tagline. Founded as a counter to what’s widely perceived as professional journalism’s leftward tilt, Fox has always aimed squarely at the conservative baby boomer sensibilities that believe in bootstrap-pulling individualism.

Conservative stalwart Jonah Goldberg quit his longtime guest gig at Fox News in late 2021 after the network let Carlson air “Patriot Purge,” a piece of pure propaganda advancing the lie that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was orchestrated by the U.S. government to discredit Donald Trump and his supporters. For years, Goldberg has been quoting Marge in “The Simpsons” talking to her husband: “Homey, it’s just amazing. Fox’s transformation into a 24-hour porn channel was so gradual, I hardly even noticed.”

Marge’s reference was a meta-commentary on the main Fox TV channel her show appears on, but it’s all too applicable to what’s happened on Fox News since the powers that be first decided to give regular airtime to Trump’s nonsense about Barack Obama’s citizenship.

Trump will lie about anything for personal gain. But not so long ago, Fox News’ leading pundits kept their agitation firmly within the boundaries of spin. Reams have been written about the ambition of the network’s longtime CEO Roger Ailes, who got his start in conservative media touring the country with his live “Richard Nixon Show” in the late 1960s. But Ailes was as much a political operative as a television ratings guru. When former Fox News host Glenn Beck started to go off the rails amid an advertiser boycott in the early 2010s, Ailes realized Beck’s resignation (or firing, depending on who’s talking) was ultimately an overall good for the network.

Beck’s conspiracy theorizing was nothing compared to Carlson’s fire hose of garbage, which has become so corrosive to American democracy that it’s earned a regular place on Russian state TV.

Carlson’s act is particularly galling because anyone who’s followed his career has long seen clearly that it’s all a put-on. The pundit who can add his latest canning to those he got at at CNN and MSNBC knows better. Way back in 2009, he said in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference that what the right needed was a reality-based media infrastructure, not regurgitation of comfortable but false narratives about how awful liberals are. “Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror” news organizations such as The New York Times, which build their reporting and commentary on a solid basis of verifiable facts, he said.

His audience booed.

I’ve long believed if Ailes had remained alive and not been forced out at Fox News himself in the wake of numerous sexual misconduct allegations, his sense of self-preservation would have curtailed or bounced Carlson years ago. Lying to your audience is bad journalism. But it also has a short shelf life.

Is Carlson’s ouster a sign that Fox News is about to make a big pivot back to pre-Trump-style Republican politics in the wake of its historic $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over the falsehoods it spread about the 2020 election? Don’t bet on it. It has further-right challengers such as One America News Network and Newsmax to fight over ratings with.

Sound-minded GOP politicians — like the loudest voices here in Missouri and Kansas — who claim they regurgitate Trump’s lies because that’s what their constituents believe, long ago abdicated their responsibility to set the record straight with the people they’re elected to represent. It isn’t the right-leaning audience’s fault that the people it looks up to most haven’t been telling them the truth.

But at least for now, one of the leading voices spreading those lies has lost his powerful prime-time megaphone. That’s ultimately a win for reality.