Tucker Carlson’s Exit Shows Who’s the Real Star at Fox

If you’re wondering did Tucker Carlson jump, was he pushed or were he and Fox News wrestling on the ledge of a skyscraper, and the two of them fell 57 stories to flattened death on a New York concrete sidewalk, you’re thinking about this the wrong way. The truth of the matter is that it doesn’t matter much why the host of cable TV’s most popular show on cable TV’s most popular network has suddenly left the building.

Nor does it matter much who replaces Tucker Carlson in the 8 p.m. block because the “talent” at the Fox News Channel has never been the star. Glenn Beck wasn’t the star in 2009 when he generated the largest viewership Fox had ever seen in the 5 p.m. hour. Bill O’Reilly, Carlson’s predecessor on the Fox schedule and the previous king of cable news, the subject of a zillion magazine profiles and the instigator of a tubful of moral panics, wasn’t the star, either. Both of them were carried out with the tide to positions of broadcast irrelevance when Fox tired of them, a longitude and latitude Carlson now finds himself in. Perhaps you recall Megyn Kelly, another Fox sensation who hasn’t had much of a career since splitting the network.

What Beck, O’Reilly and Kelly didn’t understand at the time, and what somebody should explain to Carlson this evening, is that Fox itself, which convenes the audience, is the star. And the star maker is whomever network owner Rupert Murdoch has assigned to run the joint. The nighttime hosts, as talented as they are — and Beck, O’Reilly, Kelly and Carlson are among some of the most talented broadcasters to slop the makeup on and speak into the camera — are as replaceable as the members of the bubblegum group the Archies, as interchangeable as the actors who’ve played James Bond, as expendable as the gifted musicians who played lead guitar for the Yardbirds.

Roger Ailes, the original architect of Fox, who founded the network in 1996 with Murdoch, explained its show-making philosophy to Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard in 2017. The subject was the early evening news-talk program, The Five, which in recent months has outperformed even Carlson’s show. Ailes explained how he filled the slot vacated by solo artist Beck with an ensemble of pundits — building a sort of Archies talk show for the Fox audience. The Five would be performed by five commentators at 5 p.m. Get it?

“Go around the table,” Ailes told Ferguson. “Over on this end, we’ve got the bombshell in a skirt, drop-dead gorgeous. … But smart! She’s got to be smart, or it doesn’t work.” Next, he said, “We have a gruff longshoreman type, salty but not too salty for TV. In the middle there’s the handsome matinee idol. Next to him we have the Salvation Army girl, cute and innocent —but you get the idea she might be a lotta fun after a few pops. On the end, we need a wiseguy, the cut-up.”

When Ailes finally cast the show with his types, Ferguson writes, he summoned them to his office and had them stand in a semi-circle around his desk to explain why he was calling the show The Five. “‘I’m calling it The Five because you are types, not people. You all are about to become very famous, and you’re going to make a lotta money. A lotta money. But don’t ever forget. Right behind you I’ve got somebody exactly like you ready to take your place. So don’t fuck up.”

The brilliance of Ailes' insight that everybody is replaceable by design faded into cheap irony in 2016 when he, too, was forced to walk the plank over sexual harassment charges. Ailes learned he was as replaceable as any featured player on The Five as Rupert Murdoch, the ultimate TV news impresario, installed a new network boss and the ratings gravy continued to flow.

Finding a Carlson substitute will be as easy for Fox as it was finding an O'Reilly substitute. There's always an understudy or two at Fox who has learned the art of demagoguery — how to pander to the stolen election liars, incite white nationalists and make long-distance love to Vladimir Putin. Ensconced in the 8 p.m. slot that was Carlson's and O'Reilly's before that, the new host will succeed enough to imagine having become a star, too, until the light dims and the Murdoch’s network births yet another star.

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Will that new star be Jesse Watters? Send your casting suggestions to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed has heard that Sean Hannity is very happy today. My Mastodon and Post accounts are like latchkey kids. My Substack Notes is a poor Twitter replacement. (Twitter is still the star.) My RSS feed has the makings of a world-destroying demagogue.