Tucker Carlson.Photo: Phillip Faraone/Getty
A little over a week afterTucker Carlson’s abruptdeparture from Fox News, a new report details how some of the right-wing media personality’s text messages may have played a role in the exit.
TheNewYorkTimesreports that one message in particular — in which Carlson admitted to rooting for a “group of Trump guys” to kill “an Antifa kid” — alarmed executives at Fox News when it came to light as part of a lawsuit.
TheTimesreports that the message was sent to a producer at the network on January 2021, shortly after the Capitol riots. “A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington,” Carlson wrote, theTimesdetails. “A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living s— out of him. It was three against one, at least.”
The text message continued: “Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it.”
Carlson went on to write that he realized he was “becoming something I don’t want to be.”
One day after the Fox board saw the message, theTimesreports they told executives at the company they were hiring an outside law firm to investigate Carlson’s conduct.
In addition to privately complaining about Donald Trump, even as he publicly courted his supporters, Carlson’s text messages show that he lambasted Fox’s management after the network accurately called the 2020 election in favor ofJoe Biden.
“Do the executives understand how much trust and credibility we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real,” Carlson wrote in one message to fellow employees in the days following the election.
In another text exchange with fellow Fox News personalitiesSean Hannityand Laura Ingraham, Carlson called the network’s news department “pathetic,” writing that it had “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”
While many of Carlson’s messages were made public, hundreds of pages of documents from the Dominion lawsuit were not — raising questions about what else the now-former Fox News host may have said about his colleagues and managers.
Fox News' only public comment so far about Carlson has been that the network and the anchor “have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”
source: people.com
