All day following the termination of Tucker Carlson at Fox News, we were flooded with speculations about the motivations of the company and the commentator.
The most obvious one concerns Fox’s recent $787 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit. No one knows if that was the key reason for Tucker’s termination.
In another version, equally plausible, Tucker had recently hardened his stance against Big Pharma and the lucrative COVID vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer. Both are hugely influential advertisers with Big Media, and Fox itself is embroiled through investment partners like Fidelity and BlackRock. All of which is to say that Tucker touched the untouchable.
In another version, Fox executives came to the conclusion that its star performer was not all that he was cracked up to be. Popular with viewers, sure, but he was also keeping other advertisers at bay and risking other lawsuits from disgruntled former employees. Dumping him would lighten the liability load of the whole company and let the executives rest more easily at night. After all, Fox is a media business above all else and viewers alone don’t pay the bills.
Usually, in these cases, it is a combination of factors in play, which together make the case for a termination. It’s best just to sum it all up as insubordination. He wasn’t willing to play ball with the corporate culture. He had planned his next show around topics of the lawsuit as a way of defending himself, as rumors have it, and the executives said no. They came to blows and tossed him out.
Excellence is often insubordinate. It’s why it is usually on the move professionally. Organizations of all sorts cheer excellence until it gets too much that way. Then they tear it down, like a band that fires its lead singer. It seems crazy but the envious hounds usually get their way. It’s certainly true in the nonprofit sector. I’ve seen it so many times that it becomes fully predictable. But it is even true in cut-throat for-profit ventures too.
The problem of litigation costs can often be a turning point. Any employee, even or especially a top performer, who can be targeted in ways that are potentially costly to the firm becomes a target. American corporate culture is uniquely litigious: the system allows anyone with deep pockets to sue anyone else with deep pockets for any reason at all, and make up whatever claims they want.
Everyone knows these days that this is a highly lucrative strategy for killing high-performing employees. It goes on with far less fanfare in corporate and nonprofit circles all over the country every day. It’s a major reason why U.S. institutions are so stuck in the mire of bureaucracy today. The legal thickets for successful companies are so broad that they can barely navigate their way around all the tangles.
From the corporate point of view, any employee who imagines himself to be indispensable—or has a large fan base that believes him to be that—is already loathed by the owners and managers, if only secretly. If that person also turns out to be a legal liability because he cannot keep his mouth shut, he is not long for that world.
The firing of Tucker Carlson tells you all you need to know about major media in this country. It is not really about reporting the truth. It is not about accuracy. It is not about holding the feet of powerful people to the fire of public exposure. It is about deference to investors, advertisers, the minimization of unexpected costs, and the preservation of the corporate oligarchy.
And that is a major reason for the declining share of the market. Overall, this is destiny and probably a good thing. I feel bad for Tucker’s staff, which has outstanding researchers but they too are being threatened with another lawsuit from a disgruntled former employee who claims she faced various forms of harassment. Everyone knows what that means. That’s well-trod territory.
So his staff will now be looking for work, and perhaps they can follow Tucker to whatever his new venture will be. Whatever happens, he is not going anywhere. Somehow I doubt that he will move from the frying pan to the fire of yet another mainstream venue. Anyone coming out of that world of corporatized news backed not by subscriptions but advertisers would be unlikely to want to repeat the experience.
A video-based Substack and a Rumble channel alone would provide him a vast income.
In light of this, consider what a treasure The Epoch Times is. You are already aware of its objectivity, its willingness to cover topics otherwise deemed untouchable, its remarkable timeliness, and the erudition of its writers and commentators. The publication is also a huge success in the English language and all over the world but also with its foreign-language editions.
I consider myself to be highly fortunate to be a daily writer here. I hope you share your own views toward this news source with your friends. Everyone should be a subscriber. It’s not expensive when you consider the value proposition. Also, its independence from corrupt advertisers and social-media giants is legendary. Of all the venues for news on the planet earth, Epoch really does stand out as a tremendous achievement, all the more necessary in our times.
Let me also state the following for the record. I’ve been writing daily for this paper for 18 months. In that time, I’ve never faced censorship. I’ve never been nudged in this direction or that. Not once have I had an article refused. Not one sentence or word has been added or taken away from the content I submitted. NOT ONCE! Not even one title has been changed from what I submit, and titles are something that the editor and not the writer control.
Just so you understand how odd this is, I’ve had the occasion a half a dozen times to ghost write pieces that appear on the New York Times op-ed page. Each time, the experience is the same. Some editor tags some public figure to write and that’s when they call me to produce a draft.
I watch as the draft is submitted to the Times and the hours pass as we await publication. The title is changed. The details are changed. Whole sections are cut then added. Breaking news changes the conclusion. The lede is rewritten. The “author” ends up beaten down and acquiescent. The end result is nothing like what was submitted and yet there it is on the page. The reader believes this article to represent the thoughts of the author but it does not. It is nothing but the priorities of the paper and editor.
I’ve seen it so often that I assume this to be the norm. This is why my experience at Epoch matters and why you should know about it. Every word I’ve submitted is printed and not one is deleted. Nor have I ever been assigned a thesis to prove. What you see is precisely what I wrote, and I’ve never once been hounded or even hinted at concerning what I can and cannot say.
In light of this Tucker mess, and so many others in the mainstream media, I feel myself overwhelmed with gratitude. My apologies for ending this column on a personal note. But I owe it to you readers that you understand what an unusual situation it is that we have here. Truly, there is nothing else like The Epoch Times in the world. Take a moment to be grateful for the hard-working journalists, the innovative owners, and the many employees who have made this dream of truth, integrity, and tradition a reality.
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