How’d Tucker Become A Lemon For Fox?

A long time Tucker Carlson reveled in the limelight as No. 1 prime time cable news anchor, while Don Lemon kept tanking CNN’s ratings without getting fired. Suddenly, both are gone. Criticizing Trump can do that to ya …

Mark April 24, 2023 as the day both Mr. Carlson & Mr. Lemon got squeezed out of their jobs. The former bowed out quietly while the latter was reportedly “stunned.” Maybe Lemon’s tone-deaf personality & Trump Syndrome had something to do with his long-overdue heave ho. You’ll recall the umpteen diatribes Mr. Lemon levelled at Mr. Trump during his presidency & even as his own viewership went the way of the Titanic. It might be fair to speculate that his series of recent gender scandals also had at least something to do with his demise. But, Mr. Carlson’s exit is another matter. He was kicking the ratings game’s butt. The WSJ (sister pub of Fox) suggested in its coverage that Mr. Carlson COULD also have been “stunned” since he “found out he was being let go [along with his $20 million annual salary] about 10 minutes before the network announced his departure.” Yet, maybe he was a little smarter than Lemon & could see the handwriting on the wall. That’s because just a week ago, Fox Corps. settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787 million in connection with its defamation lawsuit arising out of the 2020 presidential election & stories aired by Fox that included Trump’s allegations of a “rigged” election. Mr. Carlson, it became known, had bitterly criticized Trump and the network for its coverage in private & emails … and would be essentially a key witness in the trial that was to supposed to start last week.

The rest is now history. And, it’s maybe fair to say Mr. Trump in his own indominable way helped make a lemon out of one journalist’s lemonade, while turning the another into sour grapes.

Davd Soul