There may be a Tucker Carlson media empire sometime in the future; rest assured, there will not be a Don Lemon media empire.
It’s been a rather big day in the media world, the latest in a seeming crescendo of shockingly disruptive changes in the American news landscape. We’re going to look back on this brief seismic era in future decades the way we excavated the archaeological levels of Troy without knowing quite what happened, because age and sedimentary layers of later experience will have obscured our living context. We’ll only see the fire charring and the wreckage as we dig down and think, Ah, this was clearly a catastrophic terminal event. Something truly crazy must have happened here.
First, Fox News got hit with a crippling $787 million settlement in the Dominion voting-machine defamation case. Then BuzzFeed News got shuttered, signaling the end of an era in online journalism. And now this morning it seems that, on Fox executives’ view and knowing of the contents of internal communications in the upcoming Abby Grossberg FNC workplace lawsuit, without further debate, more or less, they put Tucker Carlson to sudden death, no shriving time allowed. So Shakespeare might have said. (He didn’t even get a farewell episode; his show was being promoted online by Fox News as recently as this morning.)
And so, Tucker Carlson goes to’t — Fox News will not be the same for quite a while, given his unique narrative-driving talents and viewership, so I ask the reader to imagine what liabilities as yet unknown to the public may be lurking unrevealed. But to carry Hamlet’s train of thought further: Since he did make love to this employment, he is not near my conscience. As I have already made clear in earlier pieces, Tucker’s defeat did by his own insinuation grow.
Conservatives shocked by the firing of Tucker Carlson can at least take solace in the — almost as if astrologically balanced — simultaneous canning of Don Lemon at CNN today, which happened for far different and infinitely more entertaining reasons. Lemon has long been on tilt, a paranoid, obsessive diva with distinct “woman” (and “shared attention”) problems that were an internal issue at CNN long before his remarkable segment about Nikki Haley’s being “past her prime” drove the whispers about Lemon’s behind-the-scenes antics into the public eye.
I’ve long suspected that Lemon was intentionally set up to fail in his morning-show slot by new CNN head honcho Chris Licht (who well understood that Lemon hates sharing the spotlight and especially hates sharing it with . . . well, women who are challenging his preeminence). Lemon’s toxic behavior internally was never redeemed by the sort of ratings that would make him otherwise untouchable had he not been close friends with former CNN head Jeff Zucker. With Zucker gone and Lemon’s highly politicized Zucker-era “Resistance” CNN brand no longer in vogue, Lemon was little better than a leftover liability to be disposed of as soon as he presented an opportunity. (To use an analogy that Brits and car-lovers will know: You can get away with having the temperament of Jeremy Clarkson only if you also have the devoted following of Jeremy Clarkson.)
And he is gone now, fired just as suddenly as Carlson and also without so much as a chance to say goodbye. Why such unseemly haste to dispose of someone who otherwise is a mere mediocre irritant? Because — and I do hope this is what perplexed future historians will take away from this day, as they sift through the blasted ruins of the post-Trump media era — Vivek Ramaswamy has perhaps justified his Potemkin presidential campaign. Lemon’s combative interview with him, which turned into a muddled shouting match as Lemon’s co-host literally started scrolling in boredom on her iPhone, was apparently the final straw. So even if this is where it peaks for Ramaswamy ’24, let it never be said that he didn’t surprise Charles C. W. Cooke by accidentally accomplishing something of note during his campaign.
There may be a Tucker Carlson media empire sometime in the future; rest assured, there will be no Don Lemon media empire. But then empires, as we have seen, crumble so easily, and sometimes so suddenly. All that’s left is the ruins to pick among, as a new landscape is built atop their detritus. What comes next for the future of Fox News, CNN, and digital journalism, after the ructions of the past few weeks have sent so many pillars tumbling? I don’t know. But over time it may all look to later eyes like the same, almost indistinguishable, kind of ruin.