libertarians

Podcast: What role did God-talk play in Tucker Carlson's fall at Fox News? Good question

Podcast: What role did God-talk play in Tucker Carlson's fall at Fox News? Good question

Rod “Live Not By Lies” Dreher has shared the following anecdote many times, but it’s especially interesting that he used it, once again, in this Substack post: “Tucker Fired Because Of Religion.”

I am using it to open this podcast post because this week’s “Crossroads” discussion (CLICK HERE to tune that in) isn’t really about Tucker Carlson’s forced exit from Fox News — it’s about whether Carlson was a very good fit with the Fox News political and cultural worldview in the first place.

My theory is that Carlson is a conservative populist — as opposed to being a D.C. Beltway Republican — and that his religious beliefs (especially after he stopped drinking) are part of that mix. This created tension with the dominant Fox News management culture, which is rooted in the Page 3 Libertarian Republican beliefs of titan Rupert Murdoch and the network’s original mastermind, the now disgraced Roger Ailes.

This brings me back to Dreher’s anecdote:

I have long wondered why Fox News doesn’t have much religious reporting, or cover things including a religious angle, even though many of their loyal viewers are religious. Now I know. And you should know too. You might recall my telling the story about how the freelancers Fox hired to cover the 2002 Catholic bishops’ meeting in Dallas, the first one after the scandal broke, asked me to brief them on who the players were, and what the issues were. They took copious notes, but when I told them about the homosexual clerical networks, and their roles in the scandal, they told me to stop. “Orders from the top of the network: stay away from that stuff,” I was told. I told them that you couldn’t understand the scandal without that factor. Maybe so, they said, but we are ordered not to touch it.

Thus, Dreher argues that Carlson’s forced exit should open the eyes of Fox News-hooked religious and cultural conservatives.

Whatever Rupert Murdoch’s internal motivations, the fact is — well, to be precise, what I confidently believe to be the truth — that Tucker Carlson gave an extraordinary speech about the theological aspect of the cultural crisis we are enduring. He talked bluntly, to an audience at Washington’s leading conservative think tank, about the fundamentally spiritual nature of the fights we’re in. And he encouraged his audience to pray for our country.

Several days later, he was fired.

As you would expect, this brings us to the much-discussed Vanity Fair feature that ran with a headline proclaiming, “Tucker Carlson’s Prayer Talk May Have Led to Fox News Ouster: “That Stuff Freaks Rupert Out.


Please respect our Commenting Policy

Bold M.Z. offers New York Times Magazine a lively update on Lutheran sex

I don't know. Maybe there are elite journalists who have trouble understanding that it is actually possible to put the words "Lutheran" and "libertarian" -- with a small "l" -- in the same sentence? Maybe that is why M.Z. "GetReligionista emerita" Hemingway is a bit of a mystery in some blue zip codes.

Anyway, it was fun to read what amounts to the CliffsNotes edition of the "Talk" interview -- "Mollie Hemingway Hates How Feminists Talk About Sex" -- that Ana Marie Cox of The New York Times Magazine did recently did with the one and only M.Z.

Via email, I asked M.Z. if there was any way that the public might be able to see a full transcript of this affair. Alas, she only has her half of the 90-minute talk, so that's a "no." But what we have here is lively enough.

The interview, as you can see in the screenshot above, starts with the obligatory question about Hemingway being a conservative who doesn't think highly of one Donald Trump. What a shock. All conservatives are alike, of course, and if you've met one then you've met them all. I mean, how can anyone follow M.Z. on Twitter for, oh, an hour and not see the Grand Canyon that yawns between her cultural and moral views and those of Citizen Trump?

Anyway, GetReligion readers will want to read this interview for themselves. However, I will offer this slice as an introduction, for obvious reasons:


Please respect our Commenting Policy