Just like Tucker Carlson, I know what it’s like to face Rupert Murdoch’s wrath | Opinion

“Mr. Murdoch would like you to leave now. You can come back tomorrow morning and gather your stuff.”

We don’t know if that was the message Tucker Carlson received from CEO Suzanne Scott when he was fired at Fox News on Monday morning just 10 minutes before it was announced on air that he was gone “by mutual agreement.”

The Los Angeles Times soon reported it was Rupert Murdoch himself who ordered the expulsion of Fox’s highest rated personality. And I know Murdoch prefers to have someone else deliver such news.

Opinion

Let me explain: Travel back with me to a cold and windy Chicago day in November, 1983. Hundreds of us were jammed in the Chicago Sun-Times newsroom. The image of Marshall Field V delivering the news that changed many lives, mine included, will never fade. The newspaper and other media holdings were being sold to Murdoch.

The cost: $90 million.

The cost to journalism in Chicago: Still counting.

The Fields could have sold the Sun-Times alone to publisher Jim Hoge’s investment group for $63 million. But according to Marshall, his brother, Ted, who lived in Los Angeles and whose career was in movies, wanted the bigger payoff, and he had the right to demand it.

The Sun-Times Murdoch bought was a serious, highly-rated newspaper with a number of Pulitzer Prize-winners on board. It was a tabloid in size only, not like the sensational tabloids Murdoch published elsewhere.

The late Roger Ebert, the wonderful film critic, also with a Pulitzer on his resume, captured the difference both beautifully and sadly: “On the first day of Murdoch’s ownership, he walked into the newsroom, and we all gathered around. He recited the usual blather, rolled up his shirtsleeves and started to lay out a new first page. He threw out every meticulous detail of the beautiful design, ordered up big garish headlines and gave big play to a story about a North Shore rabbi accused of holding a sex slave. The story turned out to be fatally flawed, but so what? It sold papers. Well, actually, it didn’t sell papers. There were hundreds of cancellations.”

“Soon, our precious page three was defaced with a daily Wingo girl, a pinup in a bikini promoting a cash giveaway,” Ebert wrote. “The Sun-Times never took that great step it was poised for.”

Talented journalists at the Sun-Times, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mike Royko and editorial page editor Lois Wille, walked across the street to work for the Chicago Tribune. In the end, about 80 staffers left for other jobs.

At the time, I was managing editor of the Sun-Times. Before the deal closed, Murdoch offered me the editor’s position. Thanks, but no thanks, I said.

The decision was uncomplicated. His vision of journalism and mine were worlds apart. It remains that way still. I agreed to stay two weeks to help through the transition.

Then, on the Saturday of that first week, I was sitting in my office, which shared a wall with the office where Murdoch was talking with his chosen publisher, Robert Page. My phone rang. It was Page.

“Mr. Murdoch would like you to leave now. You can come back tomorrow morning and gather your stuff,” he said.

Sunday morning was bittersweet.

Bitter because I was leaving a place where dedicated journalists, under Hoge’s creative and wise leadership, had built a newspaper filled with splendid writing, photography and solid investigative journalism. A real Chicago newspaper that — unlike Murdoch’s Fox cable operation and its nightly gossipers — could truly brag about its commitment to the “highest journalistic standards.”

But it was also sweet because a number of staffers showed up to help me pack. It was the kind of moment you never forget.

And it was extra sweet because my family and I landed in Sacramento.

Gregory Favre is the retired vice president of news for the McClatchy Company and was previously executive editor of The Sacramento Bee.