Watters was an immediate hit, and Fox learned that the audience likes to be part of the selection process. It may take some time for Carlson’s replacement to be known: Fox took a year, using guest hosts, before naming Jesse Watters as its 7 p.m. There’ll be a dip, just like after O’Reilly, but I expect the host will be competent enough to earn the audience’s trust quickly.”Ĭarlson was named to replace O’Reilly on the day O’Reilly was fired. “Fox will offer another host who speaks into the audience’s concerns. “People are creatures of habit,” conservative talk show host Erick Erickson said. A new host who reflects the Fox audience’s conservative philosophy but is less controversial could also be more popular with advertisers and thus more lucrative. But as the Dominion case illustrated, the spread of conspiracy theories has made Fox legally vulnerable. In contrast, his ouster was the lead story on ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts.įox hasn’t discussed its reasons for cutting ties with Carlson. “We’re not talking about Tucker,” former colleague Sean Hannity said in one of the two very brief mentions of Carlson’s name on Fox News on Monday night. The day he was fired, Carlson was nearly invisible on the Fox News prime-time lineup that he used to dominate. “What is this related to? One can only guess, but clearly, the wealth of views in the American information space has suffered as a result.” involvement in the Ukraine War received such notice that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov brought up Carlson’s firing at the United Nations on Tuesday. Carlson hasn’t talked about his firing, and didn’t return a query from the AP on Tuesday.Ĭarlson heavily embraced some conspiracy theories, particularly surrounding the Jan. “If Carlson now begins attacking Fox as ‘corporate media’ that despises its Trump-supporting viewers, he could cause the network to begin bleeding viewers” as it briefly did after the 2020 election, Hemmer said. Smerconish noticed the number of callers to his own talk show who said they would miss Carlson’s ability to challenge groupthink. While Fox has shed big-name hosts with little damage in the past, the ouster of Carlson comes at a precarious moment for the network, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.”Ĭarlson was the person there who best excelled at exciting the base of the Republican Party, she said. O’Reilly now hosts a podcast and Beck has the sixth-most popular radio talk show in the country, but neither has the influence they had when they were on Fox, said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine.Īt Fox, the platform is king, Harrison said, not the on-air personalities. His ideas were echoed by many Republican politicians and there was talk of him being a future candidate, too. He was replaced by Carlson, a cable news journeyman whose angry, grievance-based program made him the most influential voice in cable news. O’Reilly’s “no spin zone” was essentially the face of Fox News for several years before he was fired in April 2017 following an investigation into harassment allegations. In 2022, the show averaged 3.4 million nightly viewers - more than Beck at his peak - and was the top-rated cable news show of the year, the Nielsen company said. would be at war with Russia, China and Iraq by 2025.Īiles replaced Beck with a panel show, “The Five,” with four conservative pundits and one liberal kicking around the stories of the day. We’re pretty happy with both of them.”īeck was hailed as an elder statesman when Carlson brought him on as a guest last month on the night Trump was indicted, where he predicted the U.S. Ailes famously told The Associated Press at the time: “Half of the headlines say he’s been canceled. There were signs that Beck was fading when then-Fox News chief Roger Ailes cut him loose in April 2011.
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