Fox News is Totally Tucker Carlson TV Now that Chris Wallace has passed away

The last fig leaf fell from Fox News, in the form of Chris Wallace’s Exit. As such, the nakedness of the Murdoch lattice assumes more clearly than Tucker Carlson’s grotesque shape.

There are some indications of the burden placed on Wallace’s shoulders when in fact The truth defender at Fox was too much for him to bear any longer.

Last month, in a long interview with Matthew Garrahan in Financial Times, Wallace declined to comment on Carlson. Instead, he offered this bromide: “I am solely responsible for and have control over my portion of the estate. I take pride in what we do… I feel a great responsibility to my audience and to the truth. Truth is non-negotiable. There is no truth. The truth is the truth”.

With Carlson’s disdain for truth-telling beyond that of other early Fox bloggers, Wallace’s image keep your own guard rails– the fact that he is the guarantor of the sanctity of the news department – is acceptable.

On a personal level, it was a tragic end for Wallace. He has been a journalist for 52 years, participating Boston Globe after Harvard. Through a lengthy stretch in the television news, at NBC and ABC, he had to work in the shadow of a legend, that of his father Mike, the fearless interrogator of some of the great football teams. world’s best, CBS’s standard tough guy 60 minutes crowd.

In the end, he succeeded in becoming his own man with a style of his own, always brief and to the point, tough without being superfluous, well respected in Washington. He was a newspaper messenger, never a carnival barker.

That makes him valuable to Fox News when he joined them 18 years ago. He brought a charm and credibility that the newsroom needed. But the seeds of a different culture were there. Fox’s first peak show host, Bill O’Reilly, under the supervision of the fox’s mastermind, Roger Ailes, turned the news into the personal agenda of a populist hardliner.

With prime time being given to bloggers, Fox has flirted with CNN and MSNBC. By 2012, its primetime audience was more than double that of the other two combined, giving Rupert Murdoch a huge new revenue stream. At the same time, Murdoch emphasized that Fox is primarily a news operation, independent of political allegiance.

Wallace stayed true to that belief. Amazingly, he still clings to it in Financial Times interview. Speaking of Murdoch, he said, “The most interesting thing when I sat down with Rupert was that he was a messenger. He didn’t want to talk about how we were going to build the audience. He wants to know what’s going on, what’s happening in the White House.”

He commended Murdoch and son Lachlan, the family’s best friend at Fox News: “The Murdochs have spent millions of dollars completely redoing the newsrooms in New York and Washington. If all you want is opinion, you don’t need all those reporters and producers, associate producers and desk assistants…where do they put their money when it comes to journalism. ”

The bigger reality is that the Murdoch family knows where their money is coming from.

Their journalism empire is a faint shadow of its former self, doomed to a free-falling industry. Fox News not only generates more profit than the rest of Murdoch’s businesses combined. Now it’s really the only thing that solidifies Rupert Murdoch’s status as a global media mogul.

There are several layers of executives between Murdoch and Fox News. He has long since ceased to be the practice boss he once was. But nothing ever happened in any of the operations that Murdoch did not allow. So no matter how Fox will question the departure of Chris Wallace, it is certain that letting the face of Fox News become primarily the face of Tucker Carlson is with Rupert’s blessing. He has to live with that.