Tucker Carlson took a moment on his Monday broadcast to announce that he is in talks with Fox News executives to, in his words, “expand the amount of reporting and analysis we do in this hour across other parts of the company.” He added that “the people who run Fox News want more of it, not less.”
Carlson has long been billed by Fox as a member of the network's “entertainment” side. In September, a federal judge wrote, quoting Fox lawyers, that Carlson’s show “is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.'" U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found that no “reasonable viewer” would take Carlson seriously.
Carlson’s reactionary antics have cost the network dozens of advertisers and revealed Fox as a laundry room for fringe bigotry looking to clean up for the mainstream. Carlson has built up a rap sheet of controversies regarding his position as the standard-bearer for white grievance, regularly espousing white supremacist talking points and even losing his head writer, Blake Neff, after revelations that Neff spent his free time posting in bigoted online forums.
Carlson did not share the full extent of the show’s expansion, but he emphasized that Tucker Carlson Tonight, with Fox’s backing, will be “getting bigger.”
Fox executives have lined up behind Carlson before. Lachlan Murdoch reportedly gave personal support to Carlson after he went on an anti-immigrant rant in 2018. The Murdoch family knows exactly what Carlson stands for, and it’s exactly what they want the Fox brand to stand for.
