Brian Stelter: Tucker Thought He Was Invincible

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Speaker 2 Welcome to the Bullet Work Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is April 25th, 2023, the day after, wow, the firing of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon.

Speaker 2 Who better to talk about this with than Brian Stelter, longtime media critic and now a contributor to Vanity Fair. So first of all, Brian, good morning.
Hey, I don't know.

Speaker 3 Is it a good morning, but it's a morning.

Speaker 2 It is a morning. Okay, first question.
Where were you when you heard that Tucker Carlson had been thrown over the ramparts?

Speaker 3 I was actually in bed. This was 11.30 a.m.
Eastern Time, and I was in desperate need of a nap, which I even more desperately need now.

Speaker 3 My kids had kept me up the night before, so I'd gotten them off to school and gotten my wife home from work, and I was just desperate for an hour of shut eye.

Speaker 3 But then when Dylan Byers' tweet popped up, and listen, if it had been anybody else who tweeted it, I wouldn't have believed it, but I knew Dylan would know.

Speaker 3 I jumped up out of bed and been running ever since.

Speaker 2 When I first saw it, I didn't see it from a tweet. I saw it something on Slack, and I have to admit to you, I thought it was a spoof.
There's no way.

Speaker 2 And I'm at a table with people, and we're all looking like that. No, that can't possibly have happened.
I mean, it was so abrupt. It was so shocking.
There were no goodbyes.

Speaker 2 I mean, no real attempts to make it look amicable or negotiated. Tucker Carlson obviously did not see it coming.
And on Friday, he signed off. We'll be back on Monday.

Speaker 2 And they were still promoting Monday's episode yesterday morning. And as far as I can tell, he was told he was fired 10 minutes before it was announced.

Speaker 2 You write in Vanity Fair, it felt like an execution. So talk to me about this.
It was brutal.

Speaker 3 It was. And I think that was probably, you know, on purpose by the Fox management.
I think there are some bosses at Fox that have wanted to do this for a long time.

Speaker 3 But, you know, let's roll back a day or two days and think. I, like most people, thought Carlson was invincible, right? I had fallen for it just like pretty much everybody else, you know.

Speaker 3 Yes, and he thought so, that he was bigger than Fox, that he was bigger than management, that it did not matter what Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott said or did or wanted.

Speaker 3 And it didn't even really matter what the Murdochs wanted. He thought he was the boss.
And, you know, gravity reasserted itself. The bosses made themselves known.

Speaker 3 I think there are some bosses there that wanted this to happen a long time ago and, you know, and couldn't pull it off until now. And that's, you know, that's a remarkable thing.

Speaker 3 And what an incredible reminder of who has the power here, who really has the power, the network, not the star.

Speaker 2 So when do you think they decided to fire him? Because I mean, the first reaction that people had was, this is like right after the Dominion lawsuit is settled.

Speaker 2 Did they wait until after that had been settled? Is this a fallout from the Dominion lawsuit? So talk to me about the timing of this.

Speaker 2 Nobody woke up on Monday morning and said, hey, we should put Tucker Carlson's head on a spike.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3 The reporting so far from the Times and other outlets, I believe Oliver Darcy, my former colleague at at CNN, has said this was decided on Friday. So that would make a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 The settlement was on Tuesday. You know, the trial was about to happen.

Speaker 3 And if it is true that the main reason why Carlson was hoisted overboard is because of what he said in those private emails and texts that Fox was able to read. I mean, think about this, right? Like.

Speaker 3 All of a sudden, your boss is allowed to see your private texts and emails, at least the ones you think are private. And in those messages, you're probably disparaging your boss.

Speaker 3 That's essentially what happened here because of the Dominion discovery process. Dominion was able to obtain Tucker's phone, basically obtain his messages.

Speaker 3 And that means Fox executives were able to see those messages. So I think it stands to reason that Fox could not take this action while heading into a trial.

Speaker 3 They could not take this action during a trial. But once there was a settlement, then this could happen.
And I remember I wrote last week for Vanity Fair.

Speaker 3 I said, I expect one or more Fox personalities to leave in the coming months.

Speaker 2 I did not think it was going to be 10 months.

Speaker 3 And I did not think it was going to be that soon. But when I wrote that sentence, it was informed by sources at Fox.

Speaker 3 It was and is clear to me that there are going to be shake-ups ongoing at Fox News as a, not always literally as a result of Dominion, but in the domino effect that's happening right now.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 One of the questions that somebody asked yesterday was, so how does Maria Bartaromo survive and Tucker Carlson doesn't?

Speaker 2 You just think it's like, just give it a couple of weeks.

Speaker 3 Give it a couple of weeks may be part of the answer, but it also may be complicated by the SmartMatic lawsuit that's still pending. There may be some other factors that we can't appreciate.

Speaker 3 Let's also keep in mind that she has a lot more airtime than Carlson. She's on three hours every morning on Fox Business.

Speaker 3 Then again, Don Lemon was on for three hours every morning on CNN until yesterday.

Speaker 2 We can get to him. So I wrote in my newsletter this morning that, you know, I.
I would like to think that this was a pivot to decency.

Speaker 2 You know, I would like to think that he was fired because of his open bigotry, you know, the great replacement replacement theory, or because they were revolted by his, you know, shameless shilling for Vladimir Putin, or maybe, you know, the belated recognition of the human cost of his vaccine denialism.

Speaker 2 You know, I would love to think that Paul Ryan rolled out of bed and said, okay, Rupert, I can't do this anymore. This is just too much.
But apparently, none of that seems to have happened.

Speaker 2 It seemed, and I'm sorry to use the language here, but I think it's the technical term. It seems as if Tucker Carlson wasn't fired for anything he said on the air.
It was his cumulative assholery.

Speaker 2 It was the hubris, the arrogance, that sense that I am bigger, as you said before, I am bigger than Fox.

Speaker 2 And you wouldn't have thought that the Fox executives would be so thin-skinned that learning that he disses them behind their backs would be that big a deal. But is that what's going on here?

Speaker 3 The short answer to your question is, yes. I believe that is what's going on here.

Speaker 3 As a student of Fox News, someone who's spent almost 20 years writing about it, blogging about it, talking to sources there. yeah, I do.

Speaker 3 I think there were other factors as well, though.

Speaker 3 This Abby Grossberg lawsuit was certainly a factor, and that was signaled to me by sources before we knew that Carlson was out, that this lawsuit was a problem for Carlson, that what she has claimed so far, and maybe what evidence she has that she has not shared publicly is and was a problem.

Speaker 3 I think if you take those two together, right, his...

Speaker 3 He's not just insulting his bosses, but probably disparaging. I mean, were we to see these messages, this would be much more clear right now.

Speaker 3 But knowing Tucker Carlson the way I do, I can very clearly imagine the kind of language he was using against his female boss.

Speaker 2 The C-word stuff.

Speaker 3 Listen, he-I don't want to say a sailor's mouth. That's mean to sailors, you know.

Speaker 3 This is a guy who thought he could say and do anything.

Speaker 3 And suddenly that has been disproven, at least for a little bit. I am very curious where he's going to re-emerge and how he's going to re-emerge.
It's so strange. He's been quiet for a full day.

Speaker 2 So I'm sitting here looking at that picture. I'm sure you remember this after the New York Times did that deep dive into how his was the most racist show in the history of cable television.

Speaker 2 And he's holding the newspaper, this front-page story that goes into all the details of the fear and loathing and the bullying that he engaged in. And he's got this big shit-inning grin on his face.

Speaker 2 Like, isn't this a big joke? It was a joke.

Speaker 2 That picture just tells me that he just thought that he was above it all, that he was untouchable, that he was astride the cultural zeitgeist, and that no one could touch him.

Speaker 2 And it was a badge of power. So, this must have been accumulated.

Speaker 2 I mean, over a long period of time that we didn't see that the people in the suites were going, man, this guy's just, he's a jerk and he's too big for his britches.

Speaker 3 Well, two thoughts on that. The first is the reports about Tucker having a close relationship with Lotha Murdoch were true.

Speaker 3 That is true. I know that from my own reporting.
There was a kinship, a friendship there.

Speaker 3 You know, they would see each other basically whenever they were in the same city, which sometimes was not that often, but they were certainly in close communication.

Speaker 3 There was a real relationship there that actually rarely exists in television news.

Speaker 3 Rarely does one of the stars have a kind of close relationship with, you know, he's the CEO of all of Fox Corporation. So what I want to know, and this is the mystery to me today, is what broke down?

Speaker 3 And did it break down? Why did it break down? When did it break down? How did it break down with Lachlan?

Speaker 3 Or was this something where, you know, they were friends, they were buddies right up until Friday, but, you know, this was just straight out of succession, just a very clear business decision.

Speaker 3 Sometimes you push your friends overboard for business reasons. That's what I'm really curious about today.
Now, I will say, I have had a sense from...

Speaker 3 insiders at Fox that we should think about what's happening to Tucker here as the accumulation of several months worth of information and several months worth of news.

Speaker 3 So I would add to the pile, we've talked about Appy Grossberg, we've talked about the Dominion case, but also what was redacted in the messages that we haven't seen, but the Fox has seen.

Speaker 3 And let's add one more element here, which is January 6th and Carlson's disgusting attempt to try to rewrite history and downplay the riot.

Speaker 2 You think that might have been a factor?

Speaker 3 You're making me nervous to say that, to admit that, but yes, I do. And that's partly based on what I've heard from insiders there.

Speaker 3 It's also recognizing what we saw on the air, which was when Carlson was given those tapes by Kevin McCarthy and when he distorted what actually happened and, you know, that bullshit, right?

Speaker 3 The rest of Fox News did not follow him. The other opinion shows didn't follow him.
They did not follow.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's really kind of crazy and kooky how you had this guy running his own show, basically acting like he had his own network, and then the other opinion shows did not follow through.

Speaker 3 If he had actually had the scoop he claimed to have, then the Fox newscast should have led with it the next morning, and they didn't.

Speaker 3 And I think when we look back, we're going to look at that as a sign that the split was happening, that the rupture was already underway.

Speaker 3 Carlson and Fox were moving apart already at that point, and it only became more clear in April.

Speaker 2 So I want to get back to the substance and the future.

Speaker 2 We know what happens to Fox, what happens to Carlson in a moment, but you and I both both have something in common that I want to bring to the table here, okay? What's that?

Speaker 2 You and I have both been fired. It is a uniquely unpleasant experience.
In this particular case, Tucker did not see it coming. It must have been a complete shock.

Speaker 2 And for anyone who's ever gone through this, there is that moment where you feel you've just been killed. Right? I mean, it's just, I mean, there's, there's the emotional thing.

Speaker 2 And the reason I'm bringing this up is because, unlike Don Lemon, Tucker Carlton has not said anything as of right now. Now, by the time people listen to this, he might have issued a statement.

Speaker 2 But my guess is that he was just in a state of shock. It's kind of like a little death.
You know, you're called in, you're told you're fired.

Speaker 2 I don't know, you might have had an inkling that it might happen, but Tucker, he didn't see it coming until he sat down in that chair.

Speaker 3 Damn, Charlie, you're trying to make me feel sympathy for Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 2 Well, no, I'm just trying to get people to understand the level of shock. I don't care whether you make $20 million a year, you're famous.
You sit down in a chair and somebody says, you're done.

Speaker 3 among the life things that happen to you you know there are deaths there are divorces and but being fired is right up there isn't it brian i mean it is it was for me yeah i'll tell you about my version really honestly i you know mine was a little different because there had been stories out in the press suggesting that maybe i was on thin ice also by the way suggesting don lemon was on thin ice and and i didn't believe the stories i really didn't believe the stories but i was given a heads up by the ceo of cnn chris licht that my show might get canceled and you know that was a really gracious thing he did to give me a preview of coming attractions, to give me, you know, a look down the road at what might happen.

Speaker 3 To be quite honest, you know, when you're told that you might get canceled, you assume you're getting canceled, right?

Speaker 2 You assume you're getting tired.

Speaker 3 So I walked out of the office. I usually Uber to home.
I walked all the way home. I stopped at my local bar, threw back a beer, walked the rest of the way home.
And I needed that walk.

Speaker 3 I needed that hour to get my head straight to feel better. And frankly, after that hour, I felt pretty good.
Then, of course, know, later on, weeks later, the show actually was canceled.

Speaker 3 For me, it actually was not as unpleasant as your fire. I want to hear about your firing.
For me, it wasn't as unpleasant, but

Speaker 3 it was a calculus about what kind of person do I want to be in this moment? What kind of television host do I want to be? What kind of dad do I want to be?

Speaker 3 And I think that's probably what Carlson's thinking a little bit is. When he does speak, when he does say something, who's he going to be?

Speaker 3 And what paths are going to be open for him as a result, right?

Speaker 2 The word you used, though, was, it was gracious. So they gave you a gracious heads up.
This strikes me as pure humiliation.

Speaker 2 So I used to be editor of a magazine and I had a dispute with the owner about an article that he did not want us to run and he wanted me to kill it and I would not kill the article, which wasn't that great, but it was a matter of principle.

Speaker 2 And so he called me into his office and said, I don't like you anymore. You're fired.
I mean, did it just like burn your face off? So there are different ways of doing it.

Speaker 2 There's the gracious way of giving you the heads up. And then there is the humiliating execution.

Speaker 3 In television, especially, you can see the difference. So, you know, not only was I given that, you know, heads up that, hey, this, this might happen, right?

Speaker 3 And, you know, again, once, once you told you might get canceled, you assume you are going to get canceled.

Speaker 3 But then when the day actually came, I was given the chance to sign off to have one final show. And again, that's a sign of mutual respect, I think.
It means a lot to a host, but a sign-off.

Speaker 3 It means a lot to the audience, too, because the audience has developed a relationship with the person. And we've seen this across television.
Forget about me.

Speaker 3 There are other examples of hosts being able to sign off on their own terms. Frankly, that's the clean way to do it when possible.
Now, the thing about Tucker Carlson is...

Speaker 3 Fox maybe didn't trust him to do it, to sign off, right? It's also possible that he chose not to say goodbye.

Speaker 3 I don't believe that's the case here, but technically, I guess it's possible that he chose not to sign off or get to sign off on his own terms.

Speaker 3 But it does emphasize the embarrassment of this, that there is no goodbye moment. There is no, hey, go sign up for my sub stack.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's what Sean Spicer did when he left Newsmax a few weeks ago. He said, go follow me on YouTube.

Speaker 2 Well, there's going to be another chapter for Tucker Carlson, unless something comes out that we don't know about yet. I mean, you know that there's going to be something.

Speaker 2 We'll talk about that in a moment.

Speaker 2 So I just want to step back because I think there are probably some people who are going to say, well, all right, you know, Tucker Carlson was bad, but, you know, all of Fox is particularly malign.

Speaker 2 I guess the point that I want to make, and I wanted to bounce off you, is other Fox News hosts, you know, are hardly ornaments of American journalism.

Speaker 2 But Tucker Carlson was a uniquely malign and toxic figure he was worse because he was smarter he was more dangerous because he knew what he was doing and you could make the case i think you have you know that over the last few years he's arguably done more than anybody else in the media to bring you know grievance-laden conspiracy theories white nationalism from the poisonous edges of the fever swamp into the political mainstream so you know i mean we could talk about laura ingram and all the things that sean hannity did but i guess the point is this is a BFD.

Speaker 2 This is a big deal because Tucker Carlson was a uniquely malicious player that had tremendous damage, not just in American politics, but to American culture. So give me your take on all of this.

Speaker 2 You know, that I think that there might be a tendency of some people just to lump him in with everybody else at Fox.

Speaker 2 And I'm not trying to defend anybody else at Fox, but saying that Tucker Carlson's firing is a much bigger deal than anyone else's. Do you agree? Do you disagree?

Speaker 3 I do agree because I felt this. I experienced it firsthand, you know, in the Trump years as someone who, like, I've known Tucker almost 20 years.
I've known Sean Hannity almost 20 years.

Speaker 3 Both men used to be rather friendly with me. Tucker Carlson once donated $100 to my blog.
Kind of weird.

Speaker 3 Days for subscriptions, right? You remember like 2018, 2019, 2020, you know, Sean Hannity was the number one star on Fox. And then you felt Carlson take over.
You felt Carlson become the big kahuna.

Speaker 3 And actually, it happened for me. I was, I wrote the hardcover edition of Hoax and then when it was time to do the paperback, I felt like things had really changed.

Speaker 3 And I added all this material about Tucker because Tucker by then was the biggest star. And it's because Carlson, you know, he spoke MAGA more fluently than Hannity.

Speaker 3 He exemplified Fox's increasingly extremist bent. And really the white identity politics of Fox were led by Carlson.

Speaker 3 To me, Carl, the way I think about Fox now is, well, recently yesterday, was that it's these three different things in one and they all live really uncomfortably in the same house.

Speaker 3 You know, there's this small news operation that struggles, you know, up against this really big opinion operation. But then there's also a third thing, and that's Tucker.

Speaker 3 And to me, Tucker is distinct and separate and apart from the rest of the opinion operation. He is not like Hannity or Laura Ingram.
And that's what you're getting at. He is uniquely malicious.

Speaker 3 He's different from the rest of the figures there. And maybe this is relevant to the future.
It's not as if there's a Tucker Jr.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's some people who would like to be, but it's not like, you know, remember Bill O'Reilly was like kind of grooming Jesse Waters.

Speaker 2 There's not a figure like that who I i can say tucker was preparing to be a successor or anything like that no then and again whoever the successor will be will probably be not be as smart and talented as he was so you know in the last few uh months the thoughts keeps coming back to me as i'm watching you know the latest thing that tucker is doing you know the putinism you know the pro-russianism you know the the various conspiracy theories you know the the way that you know he'll have the show sound you know like a smirking 4chan episode and thinking what was he doing it was felt like he was like testing the limits all the time, that there was part of him saying, what can I get away with?

Speaker 2 How can I push the envelope further? What can I say today that's more outrageous than I said last week? Did you sense any of that? That there was something going on with him.

Speaker 3 Well, we don't know, but maybe he did see this coming. Maybe there's a part of him.
that did know this was going to come to this point.

Speaker 2 Or he thought he was completely immune, that he could just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it to make himself this third thing to create an independent identity where he was untouchable, that he would have his own lane.

Speaker 3 His own lane, this conspiracy lane, this paranoia lane. I mean, it was about two years ago that Oliver Darcy and I went on CNN and said, Tucker Carlson is the new Alex Jones.

Speaker 3 He is doing info wars on Fox. And we felt like we were kind of out on a little bit of a limb at that point.

Speaker 3 Like we had the video evidence, we had the clips, we had the proof, you know, we aired it all.

Speaker 3 But like when I wrote that banner, you know, for that segment, I was like, oh, if we're tiptoeing up to our line right here, you know? And now, two years later, that's not a controversial statement.

Speaker 3 Ben Collins at NBC made the argument that Tucker was going further than Alex Jones. So the question becomes, why was he pushing?

Speaker 3 Why was he going further and further into his fantasy land or his nightmare land? And I think it has a lot to do with the ratings.

Speaker 3 I think Nick Confessori's reporting in the New York Times last year in that article that Tucker's been holding up with a shitty grin.

Speaker 3 Nick Confessori writes about Tucker's use of the minute-by-minute ratings to see what made the audience the most addicted to what he was doing.

Speaker 3 And it was the white white identity politics type of stuff.

Speaker 3 So to the extent that Tucker was chasing that high, trying to get that high again and again and again, that ratings high, I do wonder if that's a part of the story here.

Speaker 2 Okay, so since we're out way over our skis here, all right,

Speaker 2 and we're admittedly speculating, what impact did it have that Tucker Carlson wasn't actually around, that he was holed up in Maine in this remote studio?

Speaker 3 On an island. Yeah.
Well, no, he lives on the island. Then he goes to the, takes the boat to the studio in the mainland, right?

Speaker 3 And, you know, he's got the Maine property and also sometimes in the year, Florida, you know, on the, on the Gulf Coast. Your point, I think, is well taken.
He's not in the office.

Speaker 3 He's not at Fox's headquarters in New York for the most part.

Speaker 2 He's more and more isolated.

Speaker 3 More and more isolated. I haven't thought about what the impact that has.

Speaker 2 So the other thing that's interesting, I want to talk about the impact on Fox.

Speaker 2 I saw a tweet from Brent Orrell who said, you know, an underappreciated aspect of this is by getting rid of Tucker, a whole circus gets derailed.

Speaker 2 I mean, you have people, you know, the Glenn Greenwalds, you know, the gays against groomers, and the kind of people that he would bring on that not even Laura Ingram or Hennedy would bring on.

Speaker 2 So I guess the question is, what does this mean for Fox? I mean, I suppose my cynical default setting is nothing ever changes. You know, Bill O'Reilly leaves and doesn't affect the ratings.

Speaker 2 You just swap in somebody else. But what does it mean for Fox?

Speaker 2 If we accept the premise that there was something uniquely malicious and malign about Tucker Carlson, then his departure will make a difference of some kind. But what kind do you think?

Speaker 3 I think it does make a big difference.

Speaker 3 And I hadn't seen that tweet until I read your newsletter, but that tweet was really interesting that there are certain figures that are only on Fox because they're on Tucker's show.

Speaker 3 It's not like those folks were always getting booked on other shows. And so I do, for the most part, the network will look different.
I mean, it will be automatically different as a result of this.

Speaker 3 Maybe I'm a little more optimistic than you. Maybe, maybe, or maybe that means I'm just a little more naive.
But I had a source say to me last night, we were talking about who's filling in this week.

Speaker 3 Brian Kilmead filled in last night, and I believe he's going to fill in all week long, although Fox has not confirmed that. A source said to me, Fox feels like Brian Kilmead knows where the line is.

Speaker 3 And I thought, that's really interesting. That's kind of the whole story right there.
The line has continued to move further to the right.

Speaker 3 It's continued to move, as Jay Rosen would say, further away from the truth, further away from reality. But there is a line.

Speaker 3 And pretty much everybody else at Fox kind of knows that, respects that, goes along with it. Tucker, of course, as we all know, didn't give a damn.

Speaker 3 So if his replacement or a successor is someone who at least knows where the line is, right? That's a change for Fox, right? That's a positive.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I don't disagree.

Speaker 2 I took a rather darker view on all of this, but I think that if you accept the principle that he really was this sort of, you know, third independent malicious wheel, then it is hard to imagine anyone doing what he did.

Speaker 3 Bill O'Reilly's famous saying on the show, remember they always say, who's looking out for you?

Speaker 3 And that was the brand. It was that Bill O'Reilly was looking out for you, right? Tucker Carlson's message was so different.
Tucker's message was, no one is looking out for you. We're fucked, right?

Speaker 3 Like we're doomed. No one's looking out for you.
Right. Now, I think the next person is going to have a different message.

Speaker 3 It's not going to be the O'Reilly message, but it's not going to be the Tucker message either. And I would like to believe, again, this is me being an optimist.
I'm embarrassed.

Speaker 3 This is going to be recorded. This is going to be used against me in years for years to come.

Speaker 3 I would like to believe that maybe Rupert Murdoch wants to drag his network back to a more reality-based place.

Speaker 3 We're going to look back and say, firing Tucker, it was Rupert reasserting control after being humiliated in 2020 and humiliated by the Dominion lawsuit and revealed to be this passive guy who just sat on the sidelines and let the democracy burn.

Speaker 3 Maybe, you know, in his final act,

Speaker 3 he's trying to drag it back to reality.

Speaker 2 Well, and also that he just wants to remind everybody everybody that there's only one boss at a time and that he doesn't need to sit around and worry about being dissed or blindsided by, what did Dylan Byers call him, this narcissist born on third base?

Speaker 2 He doesn't have to worry about that sort of thing. I mean, that's certainly possible.

Speaker 2 So in other words, this is in some ways in the penumbra of the Dominion lawsuit, that that was a sobering experience, that it wasn't just something where they wrote a check and then just blithely went on, that perhaps this has had a longer-term impact on the culture and the psyche of Fox.

Speaker 2 That's an interesting point.

Speaker 3 Look, there's so many people at Fox who despised Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 3 I know some folks don't believe it when I say it, but it's true. He didn't even have a lot of allies internally.
As I said, he was a third thing.

Speaker 3 He was not part of news and he was not part of opinion. He was this third thing.
And now without that third thing, it may make Fox a little more stable.

Speaker 2 It might, yeah, I don't know. So did you believe that reporting in Rolling Stone that people reacted with pure joy to his firing?

Speaker 3 You know, I'm such a nerd about these things. I read those quotes and I try to guess who the sources are, who the people are, and I sometimes think I can guess who they are.

Speaker 3 Yes, I do think there was some of that. Interesting.
But let's also recognize, you know, some of the real skeptics and dissenters have left.

Speaker 3 You know, more every year, more of the folks at Fox who tried to keep the place tethered to truth have left. And so there are also, you know, some very trumpy true believers there as well.

Speaker 3 By the way, the reporting about Tucker's top producer also being canned, I have a suspicion there's maybe other producers also leaving.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's another thing about how this is going to reshape Fox is if you have all the same producers putting on the same conspiracy show, it doesn't really matter who the host is.

Speaker 3 But if they replace the producers, and I think that's what we're seeing, then that does signal real change.

Speaker 2 So let's talk about politics. You wrote that one of the biggest, baddest loudmouths in television history is suddenly silent.

Speaker 2 And you were on PBS and said, you know, Tucker Carlson was basically controlling the Republican Party. Whatever he wanted, he got.

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, famously, Kevin McCarthy, you know, gave him that January 6th surveillance tapes.

Speaker 2 He's the one that sent out the survey to all of the potential presidential candidates, you know, asking them, you know, tell me what you think about Ukraine and everything.

Speaker 2 So do we have any idea what this means for Republican politics, leaving aside the future of Fox?

Speaker 2 Because Tucker Carlson was clearly thinking of himself either as a kingmaker or a potential one-to-be king killer. What happens now?

Speaker 3 Now it's like the energy disperses, right? And there was already within Fox, you know, competition about getting certain candidates at certain time slots, right?

Speaker 3 Now Tucker, you know, with all his power is gone. And maybe that opens up opportunities for others.
Certainly candidates are going to want to be on at 8 p.m.

Speaker 3 So whether it's Brian Kilmead or others gets the highest ratings. But I think, yeah, it's like that energy and that power like disperses, you know, like it blows off in 10 different directions, maybe.

Speaker 3 Is that right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, this does change the power dynamic. So what do you think Tucker Carlson's next play is? Where does he go?

Speaker 3 I wish I had a really smart answer to that.

Speaker 2 He's going to be Donald Trump's vice president. No, I'm just kidding.
I'm just making this.

Speaker 3 There's no way he would ever be vice era again.

Speaker 2 Nothing, no. See, I was thinking about that.
People say, well, he's going to go to Newsmax or OAN. No, this is a guy that's been fired from all three major networks.
He's got the trifecta.

Speaker 2 He does not want to step down to another network. So what does he do? What is the play?

Speaker 3 I think that's probably what he's working on as we speak. I don't see him stepping down to a Newsmax or OAN.

Speaker 3 I would only see him trying to take over a network like OAN, right? You know, remember the Oprah model where she took over a small cable channel and tried to do something new with it.

Speaker 3 But he also might look at this world and say, cable's the past. I want to be the future.
If he launched a sub stack right now or something like it, how many people do you think would pay today?

Speaker 3 Half a million? Three quarters of a million?

Speaker 2 Yeah, $100 a year.

Speaker 3 Do the math. You know, he would have to pay staff and all that, but that is a really interesting business question.

Speaker 2 And of course, you know, he's got the studio, right? I mean, he's unless they come and take back all of his equipment. Do they come and take back all of his equipment? What do they do with that?

Speaker 2 I mean, he's got all that shit up in Maine. Are they going to come with trucks and say, turn in your badge, Tucker, and we want that camera?

Speaker 3 That is so interesting. I'm going to go out back on the speculative limb here.
Yes, I think they will. I mean, just thinking about, you know, what I know of television news.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, Fox's stickers and labels should be all over that equipment. That's all coming home to New York, unless he had some unique relationship where he worked out, where he owns it somehow.

Speaker 3 But no, I think that's all going back to New York. I think Tucker can do whatever he wants in the right-wing media universe, but only in the right-wing media universe.

Speaker 3 You know, it's, yeah, he exists on an entirely different planet than Don Lemon. And, you know, 10 years ago, right, 15, 20 years ago, when Tucker was on MSNBC, he was able to cross over, right?

Speaker 3 He was, he was able to have what we would call mass appeal. But now there's no going back, right? Now he only can speak to a radicalized audience.

Speaker 3 And that's why I say, could he get a million paying subscribers? Could he get a million and a half?

Speaker 3 Glenn Beck made that work for a while, but you know, do we talk about Glenn Beck the way we talk about Tara Carlson? No, we do not.

Speaker 2 No, we don't. Okay, so you and I assumed that we were going to be talking today about the Dominion settlement and what's going on there.
And obviously,

Speaker 2 that feels so different right now.

Speaker 2 So let's talk a little bit about the state of play for Fox because you have this massive settlement with Dominion, but then you have the SmartMatic lawsuit, which is just hanging out there.

Speaker 2 You have the Ebby Grossberg lawsuit. So, what is the state of play? If you're the Murdoch and you're looking at this litigation landscape, what are you thinking? Do you think?

Speaker 3 Just make it go away.

Speaker 3 That's what you're thinking. Just make it go away.

Speaker 2 It's going to cost a lot of money.

Speaker 3 We got $4 billion in cash. Just make it go away.

Speaker 3 I think we will see a SmartMatic settlement in the weeks or months to come.

Speaker 3 It might take longer than people expect, but there's no reason why Fox is going to let this drag out till 2025 and end up in trial in New York.

Speaker 3 Again, if you believe that Rupert Murdoch might in his twilight years be maybe trying to drag Fox back to the right of center as opposed to right and crazy, then

Speaker 3 he might be thinking, where did I go wrong here? How did this happen? How did I let this happen? How did Suzanne Scott let this happen?

Speaker 3 How did we get to the point where there's all these liars on my air lying about Trump maybe winning an election he actually lost? How did this happen?

Speaker 3 Clean it up, make it go away. That's very much the vibe that I'm getting.

Speaker 2 See, this is so interesting because, you know, part of me last week was thinking, okay, they've avoided the trial. You don't have to testify.
You've written it off.

Speaker 2 And they're probably opening up champagne over Fox. But today,

Speaker 2 in our conversation, I'm thinking that's completely wrong. What's happening is that Rupert Murdoch is sitting in a darkened room saying, fuck, I never want to go through that again.

Speaker 2 You know, I have to clean up this mess. This was not fun.
This was humiliating. And it feels as if something was broken.

Speaker 2 We were were talking about, you know, what broke the relationship with Tundra Carlson and his, you know, buddy, you know, Lachlan Murdoch.

Speaker 2 Well, obviously, from the point of view of the Murdoch, this Dominion lawsuit was a nightmare. It was a traumatic experience, and it changed a lot.

Speaker 3 This is reminding me of what Gabriel Sherman wrote in Vanity Fair, this May cover story about the Murdochs. Here's his kicker.

Speaker 3 He says, Murdoch seemed trapped by the people he radicalized, like an aging despot hiding in his palace while the streets filled with insurrectionists. That's good.

Speaker 3 That feels like the story here to me. You know, Gabe had that detail about the woman that Murdoch was briefly engaged with and then he broke off the engagement.

Speaker 3 And a source told Gabe, yeah, she said Tucker Carlson's a messenger from God.

Speaker 3 And he said, nope.

Speaker 3 Right. This idea that, you know, he falls in love.
He falls for this woman who is the Fox viewer. She's the Fox audience.
She's the one that's a true believer in Tucker. And Rupert knows better.

Speaker 3 And Rupert, Rupert knows Tucker's not a messenger from God. And even if she meant that as a metaphor, you know, we can understand that sense of radicalization among part of the Fox base.

Speaker 3 And Rupert's sitting back and thinking, what have I done? What is this?

Speaker 2 What have I done?

Speaker 3 That's what somebody at Fox said to me the night of the riot, late in the day, January 6th, a text message from a staffer, and it said, what have we done?

Speaker 3 And I ended up leading the paper back in hoax with that because that's the question. Like, what have we done? And is there any, can it be changed, right? Can it be moderated?

Speaker 2 In the twilight of his life, whether he's thinking about all this. So I feel like we've given short shrift to your former colleague, Don Lemon.

Speaker 2 That would normally be the biggest media story of the year. If anything, that was uglier than even the Tucker thing.
I mean, it blew up very, very quickly.

Speaker 2 So give me your insight into that because I have none.

Speaker 3 Well, number one, I had to figure out yesterday, were these somehow linked?

Speaker 3 Did one network know the other was about to do it? And I called around and I swear everyone came back and said the same thing. Fox had no idea CNN was about to fire Don Lemon.

Speaker 3 CNN had no idea Fox was about to fire Darren Carlson. This was just a crazy coincidence.

Speaker 2 It is a crazy coincidence.

Speaker 3 It's amazing. I think when it comes to Don, I have not figured out why it happened on Monday, but I do think it was inevitable.

Speaker 3 You know, I mentioned the reports last year that Don and I were both on thin ice at CNN. Clearly, the ice was melting underneath his feet.
I don't know why Monday as opposed to last Friday.

Speaker 3 That part doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Speaker 3 But when he was told by his agent that they were going to go ahead and deliver him the news, Don decided to put out a statement instead of actually having the sit-down meeting.

Speaker 3 You know, got to give him credit for transparency, I guess. You know, he went out there and said, I've just been terminated and they didn't have the decency to tell me to my face.

Speaker 3 CNN says, well, we would have told you to your face if you'd wanted to. And I'm just guessing here, but I'm trying to make an educated guess.

Speaker 3 I think things had gone so downhill, things had kind of corroded so much between Lemon and CNN that it was probably going to end like this.

Speaker 3 You know, it's the opposite of what I experienced and what I described, which was a really mutually respectful, you know, a gracious goodbye.

Speaker 3 I think it's possible that, you know, this has gone on for months. Things were not going well.
There were controversies, you know, there were self-inflicted wounds.

Speaker 3 And so it was going to end in an ugly way.

Speaker 2 And it did.

Speaker 2 So you're working on a new book about this, right?

Speaker 3 I am. I'm doing a book all about Fox in the post-Trump years called Network of Lies.

Speaker 2 So, man, you're going to have to do like revision.

Speaker 2 You know, thank God for, you know, word processing, huh?

Speaker 3 Thank God I hadn't really started writing yet. Okay.

Speaker 3 Although we are going to come out fast. We're going to come out in November.
We don't want to waste any time. It's called Network of Lies.
And I'm doing it because I feel like I wrote Hoax too soon.

Speaker 3 I ended hoax in September of 2020, like right before the story got great. You know, right before the big lie, right before the riot, right before the Dominion and the SmartMadda case.
So bigger lie.

Speaker 3 Basically, exactly. What I'm going to use is I want to use all the material in the Dominion legal filings to tell the

Speaker 3 back story, to tell the story. You know how the media world works.
I don't mean this as a criticism of my colleagues. I love all those media reporters out there.

Speaker 3 But when these legal filings would come out, there'd be thousands of pages dumped on us on an afternoon. And most of the stories would hone in on the same few quotes.

Speaker 3 Tucker Carlson says Trump's a demonic force.

Speaker 3 We all know a few of those quotes that became headline news, but the truth is there are tens of thousands of pages of filings that I'm going to use as the raw material for the book.

Speaker 3 I'm just going to go mining for gold and dig in and find the rest of the story.

Speaker 2 Brian Stelter is currently a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, and he was, of course, media reporter for the the New York Times, the chief media correspondent for CNN Worldwide, and the anchor of reliable sources.

Speaker 2 He's also the author of Top of the Morning and hoax, Donald Trump Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, and as he just told you, of the forthcoming network of lies.

Speaker 2 Brian, it is great to reconnect and talk with you today, especially.

Speaker 3 Thanks so much. I'm going to go start writing.

Speaker 2 And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
We will be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.

Speaker 2 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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