Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) took notice of the sudden firing at Fox News of longtime host Tucker Carlson. Fox itself didn’t provide much of an explanation for Carlson abruptly going off the air, with his last show having been what turned out to be last Friday, although a report from the Los Angeles Times tied the exit to a lawsuit from former network producer Abby Grossberg alleging discriminatory behavior.
“Now that Fox has fired Carlson, who blundered by speaking off-camera truth about lies Fox told on air, will Fox recant Trump’s Big Lie, Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” Jan. 6 false-flag disinformation & the toxic Great Replacement Theory?” Raskin asked in a Twitter post. “Or was he just fired for saying he hated Trump?”
Carlson expressed despisal of Trump in private text messages from after the 2020 presidential election that were revealed in the course of defamation litigation from the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems over lies about the 2020 race and the company’s claimed role in imaginary fraud. Carlson claimed in an interview after the messages surfaced that he’d expressed his frustrations in a highly specific context of claims passed along from the Trump campaign turning out to be bogus.
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he said in the original texts, per a recap provided by NBC. The specific claims about which he was allegedly upset after comprehensive fact-checks emerged involved ballots allegedly cast in the names of dead individuals in Georgia. Multiple people included in the list of disputes were living.
Carlson, while on the air at Fox, has also been involved in spreading other damaging and comprehensively false conspiracy theories, including that the Capitol riot wasn’t actually as bad as has been claimed, as though he can simply wish the footage documenting brutal violence across the Capitol grounds into non-existence. And just to make the ramifications clear, House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has allied himself with a guy who evidently was too much for even Fox News. The report from the Los Angeles Times, which said Fox leader Rupert Murdoch personally got onboard with Carlson’s departure, identified Murdoch as allegedly also concerned about Carlson’s coverage of the riot. Carlson, in the course of his riot coverage, highlighted isolated pieces of footage showing a lack of physical violence… and if you wanted to see the documentation of assault after assault on officers, the evidence is available on Google.
Now that Fox has fired Carlson, who blundered by speaking off-camera truth about lies Fox told on air, will Fox recant Trump’s Big Lie, Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” Jan. 6 false-flag disinformation & the toxic Great Replacement Theory? Or was he just fired for saying he hated Trump?
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) April 24, 2023
