We’re now a few hours out from the first reports that Fox News had canned its top rated host Tucker Carlson. As best I can tell there’s still no clear explanation of why this happened. There are reports he’d been too critical of Fox management. There are reports pre-pretrial discovery unearthed revelations that could be damaging to Fox News in other lawsuits. Yet another report says it was Carlson’s peddling anti-semitism or perhaps the hostile harassment-saturated environment he created at his show, according to the suit by producer Abby Grossberg. Many of these reasons are reported as ‘contributing’ to the decision to oust Carlson. And there seem to have been a lot of them. Indeed, there appear to be so many ‘contributing’ factors – of various different sorts – it’s a wonder Carlson lasted as long as he did.

We don’t have many details yet beyond a clipt press release from Fox and the note that the departure is effective immediately. There were a number of fall-out scenarios I envisioned after Fox’s settlement with Dominion. But this wasn’t in any of them.

There’s a key reason why.

It’s certainly not an unprecedented move, but it’s notable. Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is skipping this year’s Georgia GOP party convention. He’s set up a funding committee structure that will essentially operate as his own party apparatus, separate from the state GOP. They don’t want him and he doesn’t need them.

I wanted to share TPM Reader JL’s note because it reveals a key blindspot. I think it’s mine. But I’m actually not sure whether it’s mine or JL’s. In any case, the point is that Ron DeSantis’s campaign makes a lot more sense if you assume Donald Trump either wasn’t going to run in 2024 or was going to mount what amounts to a placeholder campaign to help as part of his legal strategy.

It is incredibly entertaining watching the dreams of Ron DeSantis and his billionaire power-broker backers crumble before our eyes. I mean, super entertaining. But beyond the hilarity there are some more serious points to note about what we’re seeing.

First a bit of stage setting.

We’re seeing lots of commentary now about all the mistakes DeSantis is making or has made. Be skeptical of that. The issue is more that his whole Trump-slaying candidacy was basically a mirage. If DeSantis didn’t exist his supporters would have had to invent him. And they did invent him, because he doesn’t exist. After 2020 and especially after the 2022 misfire there were lots of Republicans, especially the big donors and operatives, who wanted to put an end to the Trump Era. The question was who could pull that off. DeSantis was succeeding politically in Florida with a pretty Trumpian agenda. So he made a lot of sense as the guy. Ron was definitely up for it. But all the eye-popping poll results and all the big money men lining up behind him had virtually nothing to do with the actual person Ron DeSantis, who is at best not a people person or a terribly dynamic campaigner.

He was the way station for the support of people who — all things being equal — wanted to move on from Trump. The second his Trump-Slayer bonafides took a hit he was always going to drop like a stone. Which is what’s happening right now. The support was a mirage. So don’t be too hard on the guy for squandering his big chance since it was always an illusion in the first place.

Back when we were writing about the three members expelled from the Tennessee state House I mentioned that it seemed like half the GOP members I looked into (either leadership or members who had run-ins with Pearson and Jones) seemed to have one scandal or another in their background. It seemed like a predictable consequence of the unbreakable hold Republicans have over the chamber: no accountability.

Well, there’s more.

Yesterday news broke that the now former vice chair of the House Republican Caucus, Rep. Scotty Campbell, had serially harassed two teen interns working for the state House. The harassment included repeated and unwanted overtures in which Campbell told one 19-year-old intern who apparently lived in the same apartment complex that he fantasized about her imagined sexual encounters with other men and women, including his fantasies or claims that she was having sex with another 19-year-old female intern. In other words, totally over the top, over the line and basically insane. Here’s part of the local reporter’s account.

I remember very clearly a decade back there were folks at TPM guffawing at “Buzzfeed News” and others, tight and distressed, saying, get real, that’s your competition now. Today Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that Buzzfeed News is being shuttered once and for all. It’s a remarkable and sobering arc over a relatively short span of time.

I’ve seen various wisecracks online about whether they’ll have listicles of the top ten reasons they went under. But you won’t hear that from me. A few dozen current employees are losing their jobs. There was plenty of frothiness in Buzzfeed. But the News division employed a huge number of incredibly talented journalists in the outfit’s heyday. These are not just kind words. There was a time when every news outlet had to contend with the giant sucking sound behind some of their best employees getting pulled away by the fat salaries at Buzzfeed and the very real excitement of the new, new thing and eye-popping growth. And it wasn’t just talented journalists. It wasn’t always the stuff you saw but they actually produced a huge amount of pretty amazing reporting. The subhed of the Times piece, which broke the news, called it an outfit that “won a Pulitzer Prize but never made money.”

That may be the most concise and fitting epitaph.

There’s currently a flood of members of Congress from Florida endorsing Donald Trump and not Ron DeSantis. I’m trying to keep up with how many are just from the last couple days. I think it’s five new Trump endorsements either officially announced in the couple days or reported as on the way. It all comes right after DeSantis visited DC to round up endorsements or at least get former House colleagues not to endorse Trump. Not yet at least.

It’s a rebuke and a humiliation, almost certainly choreographed by Trump. It’s all part of the story of DeSantis’s collapsing campaign, a story much of the press still won’t quite accept. But there’s a specific part of this I want to highlight for you.

I wanted to address a separate issue about the Fox settlement. Through this process what we might call the glitz media press was quite skeptical both of the strength of Dominion’s suit and what it meant for press freedoms generally. I noted some of this last month from the two media reporters from Puck News, Dylan Byers and Eriq Gardner. But they’re extreme examples of a general phenomenon.

The general point is that media reporters don’t seem terribly well versed on media law. There was some pretty basic lack of knowledge about the key elements of defamation law. The general reason for that is that most glitz media journalism focuses on a mix of personalities and the business of journalism. And in this case by the business of journalism I mean acquisitions and mergers of the big conglomerates, market fluctuations and so forth. There are lots of media reporters who know the legal stuff cold. But they don’t tend to be the category of reporters I’m talking about here. They’re writing in the digital equivalent of what were once called the ‘small magazines’ or in the niche media press.

In those pieces I noted above Byers and Gardner treated reports that Fox was in a dire situation as a sort of liberal fanfic, untethered to the reality of the situation. But what struck me more than the poor legal analysis was the general sense that those who hoped for Fox to gets comeuppance were either naive about or indifferent to press freedom generally.

I’m seeing a lot of mixed opinions about the Fox/Dominion settlement. Mostly, I agree with David’s sum-up and response. To the extent you’re disappointed or feel like Fox got away with it, your expectations were unrealistic. Dominion’s a private company. It’s in the business of being in business and making money, not saving American democracy.

It’s genuinely difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the financial settlement: upwards of a billion dollars. Someone asked me yesterday if it were the biggest defamation settlement in history. I noticed a few reports basically hedging on this point, calling it likely the biggest settlement ever. But I think that’s mostly because it’s hard to prove a negative on the fly. I’m not sure there’s ever been a pay out even a 10th the size. (Mammoth verdicts are often trimmed down or tossed entirely on appeal.)

I’m also surprised that there was no admission of error, let alone an apology — we’ll get to that in a moment. But the reality is that the discovery process itself was a devastating verdict on Fox’s lack of any journalistic principles as a news organization. And the galactic size of the settlement really speaks for itself.