Diana Wichtel: The end of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson, former Fox TV host. Photo / AP

Opinion

Before there was a term for it, I discovered hate watching: the guilty pleasure of watching something so compellingly awful it makes your fillings ache. Hate listening in this case, on my tinny transistor when I was supposed to be going to sleep. Sometime in the early 60s I stumbled upon the dark prophecies of evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong on a show called The World Tomorrow. Did I know the United States and Great Britain were identified in the books of Jeremiah and Isaiah? I did not. “Increasing crime, total moral decay of the home by juvenile delinquency and lawlessness …”; “Shocking and frightening statistics …”; “The national debt …” In retrospect, Garner Ted warning of the multiple abominations heralding the End Time sounded a little like the Opposition during Question Time.

The child of an atheist Jew and a lapsed Catholic, I was immune to his attempts to terrify me with the prospect of eternal damnation. In the end he was the one who sounded scared, of a time when children would be disrespectful “and women would rule over us”!

Garner Ted, who eventually had his own fall from grace, came to mind when news broke that a more recent prophet of doom, Tucker Carlson, like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck before him, had abruptly “parted company” with Fox News. I was an occasional viewer. His puzzled - has-my-screen-frozen? - facial expressions. His blasts of high-pitched giggling that went off like a conservative warning klaxon in the face of some poor member of the “liberal elites” he’d lured on to his show. It’s a sign of the end times, surely, that someone with a name like Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, who has boasted he’s always been so rich he never needed to work, can brand himself as the voice of the ordinary Joe, but never mind.

It’s unclear exactly why Carlson got the chop. His reputation among his fans for squeaking truth to power took a hit when the Fox/Dominion Voting Systems trial revealed texts that showed that Carlson’s backing of Trump and his “stolen election” claims were at odds with what he and other Fox presenters were saying off air. Even they didn’t believe it. There were profoundly disagreeable comments about colleagues, etc. Lawsuits threatened.

Here, over the years, we’ve had talented broadcasters – Paul Holmes, Paul Henry, Sean Plunket – who, encouraged to push the boundaries for ratings, eventually find out how much is too much and do an unconvincing apology or and/move on. Carlson’s latest fortunes show that not many people, especially those with a performer’s ego, are good at handling the freedom to say whatever, often cynically deployed, nonsense that comes into their heads.

Carlson got away with all manner of conspiracy-mongering, from Covid vaccines to Great Replacement-style views on immigration, which, he said, “makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided”. He used selected footage from the US Capitol attack to reframe January 6 as a sort of peaceful patriots’ picnic.

He ended up more televangelist than news programme host. Like Garner Ted, he was big on aliens and the end of everything. The end of men, the end of meat (see his piece called “Let Them Eat Bugs”). He’s probably too insulated by privileged circumstances to be scared of anything much but he did his best to ensure his audience was kept in a state of high existential alarm. Carlson’s post-departure video set things up for the ministry to continue. “When honest people say what’s true, calmly and without embarrassment, they become powerful,” he prophesied. He didn’t mention what happens if they say it with giggling and gormless gurning and it’s not really true at all.

There is the awful prospect that Carlson may not sink pretty much without trace as happened to O’Reilly and Beck, who took their agitated cogitations out of the mainstream and back to the fringes where they belong. We increasingly inhabit times when people can feel powerless and ignored. Broadcasters’ contrarian antics can be mistaken for strength and power. When times are uncertain, keep sending in the clowns.