Kate Riga and I discussed this during the podcast today — for scheduling reasons we recorded one day early this week. But so many of you have asked me this question that I wanted to address it here in the Ed Blog. The question is this: Is it possible that Tucker Carlson’s termination was a non-public part of Fox’s settlement agreement with Dominion? I have no inside information. But I’m pretty sure the answer is no.

Republicans’ inability to find their footing in a post-Roe America remains an omnipresent issue not just for the GOP as a whole, but one that is increasingly tripping up nearly every Republican with 2024 ambitions.

I’ve mentioned a few times my love/hate relationship with the media reporting of Dylan Byers and Eriq Gardner, the glitz media columnist for the prestige newsletter bouthemoth (boutique+behemoth) Puck News. It’s all leveraged buy-outs and acquisitions and gossip about top personalities and nothing much about journalism or the law of journalism. But, I thought, if they’re ever going to come through for me it’s going to be on the Carlson/Fox story. So I checked out what they had with no little expectation.

We just got news earlier this afternoon that Nate Silver is being let go by ABC News/538 as part of a round of Disney layoffs. ABC News is part of the Disney corporation. Just as important, though ABC News is apparently holding on to the 538 brand, they are apparently letting go of most of the staff.

I made the point clearly below that there’s going to be one big reason why Tucker Carlson got canned, not a bunch of little reasons that tipped the scales against him. It’s going to be one big, big thing that renders the secondary good and bad things basically irrelevant. Except there’s maybe one other possibility. Let me caveat this by asking you to think of this as somewhere between an edge case possibility and an explanation from an alternate universe.

Got it? Great. Let’s dig in.

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.

The single best thing about this job and the work we do at TPM is that I don’t have to bifurcate my life between the work I do for a living and the good I’m trying to do in the world.

That’s a luxury not everyone enjoys.

When I think about our audience, when I visualize who I’m trying to reach and to serve, it’s the folks who don’t get to pursue mission-driven work or work that directly makes the world a better place. 

I imagine us acting as emissaries on your behalf, and I feel a special dedication to you because I’ve been in that position before, too.

That’s not to say the work we do is better or more important than what you do. There are as many different ways to contribute in the world as there are people in it. But I know that feeling of being cut off from the wider world and the work of improving it. I’m grateful every day not to feel that way in this job.

Which brings me to what it means to support TPM. Joining TPM and contributing financially to what we do supports our work on behalf of all of those who are tied down by their daily obligations or their commitments to others, and who can’t venture out into the wider world. We do it for them. We do it for you. 

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