Yer Out!

The whispered reason the Murdoch family canceled their prime time Fox News star Tucker Carlson, was he allegedly mistreated colleagues including disparaging a female Fox executive with a very derogatory word.  The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal’s headline was “Carlson’s Vulgar Messages about Colleagues Helped Seal His Fate.”  The newspaper said, “The private messages in which Mr. Carlson showed disregard for management and colleagues were a major factor…”

Never mind the $787.5 million Fox had to fork over in its defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, with the lies Carlson knowingly and deceitfully perpetuated on his highly popular cable talk show as a central cause for the settlement.  The Murdochs, as they want to spin it, were fed up with his potty mouth.

Okay, whatever.  Carlson’s gone so let me give you some insight into what is going through the minds of the Fox News hosts that remain employed.  It comes from more than four decades running news departments and dealing with talent, as the on-air people are known.  

Talent are genetically insecure (maybe that’s what motivates them) and obsess over which way the corporate winds are blowing.  For some, their entire raison d’etre is their TV job. The fact that the Murdochs sent their prime time star, the face of their highly successful network packing, let me tell you, sends a shiver down the spine of the other conspiracy enablers, Hannity, Bartiromo, Pirro, etc.   They now know no one is untouchable and no one is indispensable.  If Tucker Carlson could get whacked, any one of them could get whacked.

They’re not, all of a sudden, going to become Joe Biden supporters, but they will think twice about giving oxygen to wackos and credence to their crackpot theories.  If the firing of Tucker Carlson doesn’t scare the heck out of them, they’re idiots and they deserve to be canned, too.  For sure, the Murdoch’s aren’t idiots and with the removal of Carlson, they’ve taken a big step reining in their renegade and reckless hosts.

Now the drama at CNN.  

Remember what I wrote back in February in my “memo” to the network’s CEO Chris Licht in the column entitled “CNN’s Don Lemon Dilemma”?   

I said, sending Lemon to “formal training” for his misogyny, at least bought CNN and Licht some time to figure out what to do about the morning show that was already on ratings life support.

Apparently Don’s time ran out along with his bosses’ tolerance for his on-air bellicosity and his off-air nastiness.  Lemon was unceremoniously squeezed out (so sorry but I just couldn’t resist) of CNN after 17 years at the network.

Licht probably has gotten a pass on his blunder of teaming the unlikable Lemon with the vanilla veteran Poppy Harlow and the neophyte anchor Kaitlan Collins, as his big move in the mornings.  Warner Discovery’s head honcho David Zaslav seems to still be a Licht supporter.  But at some point, if the falling knife that is CNN continues, Licht will have to explain how he, the so-called guru of morning news, did such an awful job in his first major programming decision.  Added to that is the prime time hole left by Andrew Cuomo that he has yet to fill.  Please don’t tell me the new Gayle King and Charles Barkley once a week show is the answer.

One less noticed but nevertheless astoundingly hypocritical side note to this the Lemon-Licht saga is the silence from the promoters and protectors of on-air African Americans, the National Association of Black Journalists.

The NABJ in the past, has not hesitated to immediately “cancel” news executives they deemed to anti-Black.  For the NABJ that carries a very broad definition including unproven allegations from media hatchet jobs.  They’ve publicly called for the firing of executives before the conclusion of any investigation to determine the truth.  The officers of the NABJ have open lines to some compliant corporate executives who prefer capitulation to possible public relations problems.  They choose immediate surrender in lieu of standing by their people.  The NABJ does not hesitate to publicly press for firings before any due process is conducted.

But CNN’s dismissal of Don Lemon, a high-profile African American TV host, is not an unproven allegation, it is a fact.  Yet as of this writing, I haven’t been able to find one word, not even a consonant or a vowel of indignation, irritation or infuriation from the National Association of Black Journalists.  

Why is that?

Maybe CNN has already whispered to the NABJ not to worry, they’ll be happy with Lemon’s replacement.  Or maybe Chris Licht knew that by announcing the Gayle King-Charles Barkley show beforehand, it gave him the cover he needed to fire Lemon.

If so, kudos to you, Chris. You made smart moves and you extracted a big talent toothache with seemingly very little fallout.  

Chris, you may have bought yourself a little more time to get things right but… tempus fugit. 

One last thing…

I was going to write this week about my extended stay in Israel, a country wrestling with enormous issues and emotions, culminating with the celebration of its 75th anniversary.  But I need some space to digest what I observed, heard and experienced and I need a little bit of time to change into my foreign correspondent suit.  Also, the banishments of Lemon and Carlson were simply too much for this lapsed news guy to pass over.