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.