Tucker Carlson’s ouster from Fox News and pivot to Twitter, explained

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson-free primetime lineup has been revealed, as has Carlson’s replacement: Jesse Watters. If you’re a Fox News watcher, Watters is a familiar face to you. His appeal beyond Fox News loyalists is an open question. And we’ll get an answer to it pretty soon.

Watters, 44, was raised in Philadelphia, to “aging hippies” who vehemently disagree with his political views. (His mother’s disappointed texts to her son have been featured on his shows.) Like Carlson, Watters graduated from Trinity College with a history degree. Unlike Carlson, he joined Fox News soon after graduating, working his way up from a production assistant to, now, the host of the channel’s flagship show. Along the way, he’s been embroiled in a few controversies, from a racist man-on-the-street segment to a recent admission on The Five afternoon roundtable show that he deflated the tires of a much younger associate producer he was interested in so she’d have to get a ride home from him. That producer is now Watters’s wife, so he said it had a happy ending — although maybe not so much for Watters’s ex-wife, who was still married to him at the time this all supposedly happened. Watters later claimed the tire story was a joke.

Okay. We still don’t know why Tucker Carlson is out at Fox* but we know where he’s going. He’s setting up shop at Twitter, cheered on by Elon Musk.

Next question: Can he make money there?

Two weeks after former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s stunning firing from the channel, he seems to have figured out his next step: Twitter.

Yes, really. Carlson posted a short video on his Twitter account on May 9 announcing the news. He praised the social media site, which has touted its supposed free speech bona fides since it was taken over by Elon Musk last October. Carlson implied that he was fired from Fox News for trying to tell the “fullest” truth too often. Twitter, it seems, won’t have such limits. It also may not have a guaranteed salary, as Musk claims Carlson is only getting subscription and advertising revenue, just like any creator.

On Tuesday night, the New York Times revealed a text message that reportedly played some role in Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News. And, on the surface, it simply doesn’t seem much worse than the things he said on air.

In the text, Carlson describes watching a video of several Trump supporters beating up an (alleged) antifa member on the streets of Washington, DC. His reaction is nuanced: He confesses to feeling a certain vicious bloodlust while watching the video — “I really wanted them to hurt the kid” — but realizes that this is a horrific impulse that ought to concern him. “I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed,” Carlson writes.

The day after Tucker Carlson lost his job at Fox News, he got some praise from a surprising source: the progressive magazine The American Prospect.

The piece may have been titled “The Smuggest Man on Air,” but its thrust was decidedly more admiring of the host. Journalists Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein wrote that Carlson was “skilled at skewering comfortable pieties on the left and right” and that his “insistent distrust of his powerful guests acts as a solvent to authority.”

Wait. Why did Fox News fire Tucker Carlson, exactly?

I’m asking because:

It might sound odd to claim that a TV host losing his program is seismic news for American politics, but with Tucker Carlson’s exit from Fox News, that claim is justified.

Like the rest of his Fox colleagues, Carlson’s main job was winning eyeballs to the network — and he was very successful at that.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.”

“I hate him passionately.”

Who really runs Fox News?

Some liberals have a mental model in which the network lies to and misleads its audience, propagandizing them to support Republicans and the right. But an ongoing defamation lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion against Fox News tells a more complex story — one in which the network’s key players feel compelled to supply the conspiratorial content the audience is demanding.