A little more than a week after Tucker Carlson abruptly left Fox News, a new investigation outlines how some of the right-wing media personality's text conversations may have played a role in his departure.
According to the New York Times, one communication in particular — in which Carlson acknowledged to wishing for a "group of Trump guys" to kill "an Antifa kid" - worried Fox News executives when it was revealed as part of a lawsuit.
According to the Times, the communication was delivered to a network producer in January 2021, shortly after the Capitol disturbances. "A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington," Carlson wrote, according to the New York Times. "A group of Trump supporters surrounded an Antifa member and began pounding the living s--- out of him." At the very least, it was three to one."
"Obviously, jumping a guy like that is dishonourable," the text message continued. This is not the way white males fight. But all of a sudden, I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder and kill him. I desperately wanted them to hurt the child. "I could almost taste it."
Carlson went on to say that he was "becoming something I don't want to be."
"The Antifa troll is a person." "I shouldn't gloat over his suffering, no matter how much I despise what he says and does, no matter how much I'm sure I'd hate him personally if I knew him," he wrote. "It ought to disturb me. I should remember that someone loves this kid and would be devastated if he were killed. How am I better than he if I don't care about such things, if I limit people to their politics?"
The message alarmed Fox News' board of directors, according to the Times, when it was discovered as part of a $1.6 billion lawsuit brought against Fox News by voting equipment company Dominion Voting Systems, which was the subject of widespread election fraud and other wrongdoing in the aftermath of the November 2020 presidential election.
According to the Times, one day after the Fox board got the communication, they informed business executives that they were engaging an outside law firm to investigate Carlson's conduct.
The voting company recently reached an agreement with the network, but not before text messages and emails from Carlson and other network stars became public as part of court papers.
Carlson's text texts show that, in addition to privately whining about Donald Trump while openly courting his followers, he attacked Fox's management after the network correctly predicted the 2020 election in favour of Joe Biden.
"Do the executives realise how much credibility and trust we've lost with our audience?" "We're playing with fire, for real," Carlson said in a message to coworkers in the days after the election.
Carlson, in another text discussion with fellow Fox reporting stars Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, labelled the network's reporting staff "pathetic," saying that it had "destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build, and the damage is incalculable."
Hundreds of pages of documents from the Dominion case were not made public, raising doubts about what else the now-former Fox News anchor may have said about his colleagues and supervisors.
So far, Fox News' only public statement on Carlson has been that the network and the anchor "have agreed to part ways." We appreciate his contributions to the network as a host and, previous to that, as a contributor."
According to the announcement, Carlson's last show was on Friday. Since then, the network has aired Fox News Tonight as an interim show hosted by rotating Fox News personalities until a new host is found.
