But they’re fighting each other, so I’m confused.” (Carlson excels at feigning confusion.) And then you said Iran is the main enemy. “I can’t tell who the main enemy is here,” Carlson said. What followed was one of the most memorable segments that Carlson has broadcast so far, as the host-deeply skeptical of the budding war effort-pushed his guest to explain what the Administration was up to. On April 7th, in the wake of the news that Trump had ordered fifty-nine missiles fired into Syria, Carlson had on Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, a noted critic of Trump who was also a full-throated supporter of the missile strike. But much of the network’s old guard remains: the network’s co-president, Bill Shine, is known as Ailes’s former “right-hand man.” And nothing about the Fox News' public response to the latest scandal has conveyed the impression that it is eager to remake its corporate culture. The departure of O’Reilly-like the departure, last summer, of Ailes-suggests that the network’s old way of operating has become unsustainable. Now the only prime-time show matching that description will be Hannity’s. When many people think of Fox News, they picture a confident man in a business jacket telling viewers what to think. On Wednesday, Fox News also announced that the nine-o’clock hour will now belong to “The Five,” a panel-discussion show that includes another mischief maker: Greg Gutfeld, the sardonic former host of “Red Eye,” a highly entertaining late-night show that Fox News recently cancelled. At MSNBC, Rachel Maddow draws a bigger audience, at nine, than Chris Hayes does, at eight. And the hosts who followed O’Reilly certainly worked in his shadow: Carlson was more intellectual and more mischievous Hannity was more politically engaged and more partisan.Ĭarlson is inheriting O’Reilly’s time slot but not his stature-and a network is not necessarily defined by its 8 P.M. Reading the Nielsen numbers, it was possible to imagine that the nightly success of Fox News depended on how long O’Reilly’s viewers could stay awake. On a typical night, O’Reilly would draw the biggest audience in all of cable news Carlson, at nine o’clock, would draw a smaller audience than O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity, at ten, would draw a smaller audience than Carlson. The devotion of O’Reilly’s regular viewers surely made this decision more difficult for Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of Fox News. His regular-guy persona will outlive the extraordinary television career it enabled. Judging from the ratings, O’Reilly’s viewers stayed loyal to him-even as advertisers fled-and O’Reilly will surely find an audience for whatever he does next. The allegations against O’Reilly made it appear as if the network still wasn’t committed to protecting the women who worked there. It seems possible that the more recent revelations damaged O’Reilly less than they damaged Fox News: its founding C.E.O., Roger Ailes, resigned last year amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment. But O’Reilly wasn’t much hurt by a widely reported 2004 lawsuit in which a colleague accused him of sexual harassment. Obama is Old School.” Carlson once wrote that O’Reilly’s regular-guy persona made him uniquely vulnerable to scandal, because fans wanted to believe in him. In his new book, “Old School: Life in the Sane Lane,” O’Reilly goes out of his way to praise Michelle Obama, writing, “I watched Michelle Obama on a few occasions treat strangers so well that I was floored. time slot is Carlson, a former antagonist of O’Reilly (he once called him a “thin-skinned blowhard”) who is now called upon to do what O’Reilly did for two decades: provide ratings big enough to insure that, night after night, Fox News remains the most-viewed cable-news network in the country.įor many years, for most viewers, the identity of Fox News has been closely linked to the identity of O’Reilly, who was flinty and utterly self-assured-and who took pains to present himself, not always convincingly, as conservative but nonpartisan. On Wednesday, Fox News announced that Bill O’Reilly, who is under the cloud of a sexual-harassment scandal, was leaving the company. This skepticism has driven the success of Carlson’s show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on Fox News, which will now become the cornerstone of the network’s prime-time lineup. Whichever way things go, the results are often compulsively watchable-at least for those with an appetite for televised discomfort. Subjected to it, a pundit or politician will wilt, or stammer, or stand firm, or (very occasionally) respond with a convincing argument. There are few forces on television more powerful than Tucker Carlson’s skepticism.
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