The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

AMERICA’S highly politicised, highly polarised cable TV networks regained centre stage once again this week, as both Fox and CNN fired popular stalwarts in the wake of accumulated indiscretions. It wasn’t surprising. A bit disappointing, maybe. But not too surprising.

On Monday, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, a mainstay of the company’s evening line-up who had seemingly found his sweet spot at the centre of a highly-successful cable news network. On the very same day, CNN chose to dismiss Don Lemon, in some ways the polar opposite of Carlson, but who also got the sack because his network bosses could no longer tolerate his casual provocations. In the days that have followed, Fox News and Fox Business have added Lemon’s dismissal to their steady diet of rants and bluster about Joe Biden’s age, failure at securing America’s southern border, and apparent disregard of the profligacy of his son Hunter. Fox rival Newsmax was full of Lemon-flavored reportage, too, bemoaning the fact that it took CNN 17 years to fire him and his misogyny.

Both CNN and MSNBC were no better, dwelling endlessly on Fox’s decision to get rid of Carlson, whose nightly audience consistently equaled one percent of the American population. That led cable news ratings for years, and Carlson’s show was perhaps strongest in the most lucrative audience demographic ranges.

But coverage was not limited to cable news rivals sniping at and enjoying their competitors’ misfortunes. National TV and print media covered the stories extensively, especially the sudden axing of Carlson.

Other than being dismissed on the same day, these two TV personalities seemed to share very little. But neither grew up poor or especially disadvantaged. Lemon was reportedly the product of his mother’s affair with a prominent civil rights attorney. Black and openly gay, Lemon was born in Louisiana and attended LSU, where he was a Republican and voted for Ronald Reagan. He later graduated from college in New York City as a journalism major in 1996 at the age of 30. He worked for Fox TV stations in St Louis and Chicago for several years and was a correspondent for NBC stations in Philadelphia and Chicago.

So Lemon, earlier in his career, worked for the “opposition” Fox stations more than once. Carlson did similarly, logging several years at both CNN and MSNBC before landing at Fox in 2009. In a 2021 interview, Carlson recalled having a “kind of meltdown” after being fired from MSNBC in 2008, the latest of a string of failures, and having to sell his house. Speaking of the television industry, he said, “I was living in that world and I was not succeeding.” Carlson attended pricey boarding schools in the US and Switzerland and got his BA degree at private Trinity College in Connecticut.

In important ways, “Me, too” led to the dismissals of both men, since evidence of gender-based scorn was often cited as a major cause for their firings.

Speaking of which, Donald Trump is about to face his own latest “Me, too” moment. His New York City trial on 30-year-old assault and defamation charges brought against him by journalist E Jean Carroll is about to get under way.

Anyhow, Lemon was host of a 10pm prime time CNN show for several years, and he was becoming widely known for his outspoken views and lengthy rants. Perhaps the beginning of the end for him at CNN came with his move last November to become one of the co-hosts of a new morning show, CNN This Morning. The show has struggled to gain a foothold in the highly competitive American morning TV market, but would have been given much more time to succeed except for a careless remark by Lemon.

In February, when former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley declared her presidential candidacy, she criticized both 76-year-old Donald Trump and 80-year-old Joe Biden for running for president at their “advanced” ages. Haley is 51.

Here’s what got Lemon moving on the slippery slope to dismissal: “This whole talk about age makes me uncomfortable. I think that - I think it’s the wrong road to go down. She says people - you know, politicians or something are not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Sorry. A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.” Whoops!

One of Lemon’s two co-hosts, veteran CNN reporter Poppy Harlow, looked aghast on camera and was briefly speechless as she tried unsuccessfully to give Lemon space to rescue himself. It’s probably just as well that his other female co-host, Kaitlan Collins, was off on assignment that day. Collins, a rising star reporter who previously served with distinction as the network’s White House correspondent, had reportedly clashed with Lemon frequently over his habit of talking over her on the air.

As for Carlson, his indiscreet remarks about his Fox bosses reportedly played a role in his firing. But his careless texts about Trump and texted references to the illegitimacy of election fraud lies peddled for months by Fox after the 2020 election contributed as well. However, reports are now emerging that in the wake of Fox’s $787.5m defamation suit settlement, an ongoing lawsuit brought by a former Fox programme assistant against Carlson for overseeing a “sexist, misogynist” workplace environment also played a role.

In some of his texts that were revealed in discovery during the defamation lawsuit brought against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems, Inc, Carlson revealed a strong personal dislike for Trump. This contrasted with his public posture of strong affiliation and even affection for the former president. New York Times columnist Michele Goldberg tried over the weekend to explain this apparent anomaly: “The similarity of Carlson and Trump’s sensibilities might derive from the similarity of their resentments. Both were children of privilege who sought the respect of the establishment but never got it. It’s worth noting, given his loathing of the putative ‘deep state,’ that Carlson tried to join the CIA but was rejected. He shifted his ambitions to cable news, but before landing at Fox News, he struggled to fit in.

“Like Trump, Carlson tapped into white viewers’ fears over the country’s changing racial demographics, which fueled Donald Trump’s rise in the 2016 election. He would regularly focus on the notion of the ‘great replacement,’ a racist conspiracy theory that claims elites are importing supposedly obedient immigrants to disempower native-born Americans. In 2018, Carlson argued that hordes of immigrants were making America ‘poorer and dirtier’.”

Liberals who think Fox News might be about to collapse may have to defer celebrating. The lucrative network has previously overcome the scandals and dismissals of such hard-right talkers as Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck and the architect of the network, Roger Ailes. Still, another huge defamation lawsuit from another aggrieved voting machine company looms on Fox’s horizon.

Meantime, over at CNN, the network continues in this era of Trump to try to shift its coverage back toward the centre of the political spectrum. Many observers feel, however, that CNN and its corporate owners are so entrenched in their disdain for Trump that any centrist shift will have to await his departure from the national political scene.

Instead, the political centre on cable news might be occupied by two-year-old NewsNation, which is a reimaging of WGN America, a Chicago TV station that became a cable system staple by developing a line-up of reruns and appeared on most cable packages because subscriber costs were low.

“Rebranding WGN America as NewsNation underscores the network’s clearly defined mission of delivering fact-based and unbiased news, while making it easier for viewers to find this new informative source for news,” corporate president Sean Compton said.

A prominent personality at NewsNation is Chris Cuomo, former CNN primetime host who was fired for inappropriately seeking to aid his brother, then New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

“I’ll never be that again. That was taken from me, I believe wrongly,” Cuomo has said. “I’m not going to bitch about it in the press … I’m trying to remember what I’ve been through every day, and not forgetting and falling back into what works and what will rate more and what will get me higher on the media list and what will get more people talking about me.”

Hmmm. We’ll see about that.