Rupert Murdoch, the outgoing chair of Fox News’s parent company, said he thought conservative pundit Tucker Carlson had gotten “too big for his boots” shortly before the host was fired by the network earlier this year, according to a new book.
The quip from Murdoch was one of several quotes and anecdotes relayed in a Vanity Fair piece authored by media reporter Brian Stelter as part of the rollout of his latest book, “Network of Lies,” focusing on Fox.
In his book, Stelter reports Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan, ultimately made the decision to pull Carlson off the air — a move that sent shockwaves across the cable news business and political media ecosystem. The same son is set to take over as chair of Fox Corp before the end of the year.
Carlson often boasted of his close relationship with Lachlan, Stelter reported, further suggesting the host had taken on a larger-than-life persona at the cable news giant — a dynamic that led to hostilities between producers working for him, those working for other shows and network leadership.
“It was always going to end badly,” one Carlson producer told Stelter. “We knew we were burning too bright.”
In the days and weeks that followed Carlson being pulled off the air, theories about why his top-rated show had been canceled spread quickly.
Fox ousted Carlson only days after it agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims of defamation out of court.
As part of the process of legal discovery, text messages from Carlson were unearthed showing him bashing female executives at Fox and using racially-charged language to describe the violence that broke out at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Stelter reported Carlson’s firing was not a condition of the Dominion settlement, as some of the hosts, allies and media reports suggested, but rather it was a combination of many factors that led to his forced exit from the cable news business.
Murdoch “is loyal, loyal, loyal, loyal, loyal — until the minute you’re dead,” one ally of Rupert Murdoch told Stelter, who wrote of the public divorce: “By pulling Carlson’s plug, Lachlan showed the same trait.”