Fox News appears to be benching yet another employee after their consistently reprehensible remarks sparked outrage. But Tucker Carlson isn’t caving to “the mob,” fellow Fox News host Sean Hannity insisted during the hosts’ Tuesday night handoff. This is totally different, and not at all him being shuffled into timeout. Why? Because Carlson had totally already planned to go on vacation this week anyway.
Declaring himself an “expert” in such matters, Hannity took a big brotherly stance with Carlson, who says they’ve spoken “every day” about the response to disgusting recordings of Carlson saying disgusting things about women and girls and pedophiles, oh my.
HANNITY: Alright, I gotta give you a compliment. So, Tucker was gonna be off this week. He was, he was gonna be off this week. But it becomes a busy news week, and he’s not gonna take the mob’s crap. And he came into work to, to, to stand up to this, and I want the great viewers of this channel to know that.
CARLSON: Well, I, I thank you, Sean, and you’ve helped me every bit of the way, I have to say. We’ve been talking every day, and I’m sick of it, I’m absolutely sick of it.
HANNITY: Yeah, I’m an expert at this, they’ve been trying to kill me for 23 years.
CARLSON: Yeah, you are, it's true.
HANNITY: I get it, kinda get it. I’m like, trying to help, I’m like you, Laura, Laura, you, me, me, Laura, you, it's like, never stops.
CARLSON: Yeah, it’s true.
HANNITY: But, anyway, always great to see you…
CARLSON: Thanks, Sean.
HANNITY: ...and have a great rest of vacation that you were supposed to have.
Media Matters for America’s Andrew Lawrence was the first to notice the emergence of the network’s go-to cover for the fairly constant stream of self-created hot water regularly dousing its “talent pool,” previously used by Laura Ingraham, as well as Hannity himself, and Bill O’Reilly.
The only question remaining is whether or not the frozen-food heir is going on “vacation” like Ingraham—who, like Hannity, is still employed by the network responsible for feeding Donald Trump much of the fake news he believes to be true—or like O’Reilly, who … isn’t.
As Daily Kos correspondent Eric Boehlert wrote just hours before the weird exchange between the millionaire fearmongers, this is shaping up to be much more like the latter.
Carlson's advertising roster was already depleted when dozens of Madison Avenue clients bolted from his show late in 2018 after he began airing wild, unhinged rants about immigrants, wrapped in his embrace of white nationalist rhetoric (e.g., immigrants make the U.S. "poorer and dirtier"). He followed that up in January by announcing that women earning more money than men do leads to “more drug and alcohol abuse, [and] higher incarceration rates.” (It does not.)
Top-tier advertisers such as Red Lobster, IHOP, Samsung, Jaguar Land Rover, Just For Men, Nautilus, Bowflex, SanDisk, and SodaStream all made it clear they wanted nothing to do with Carlson's hate show. Prior to his anti-immigrant rants, Carlson's program regularly featured nearly 40 commercials per episode. By late December, that number had fallen to 21. Why? Not enough advertisers to fill the slots. "Most noticeably, the show has generally pared back from five standard advertisement breaks to four, and has leaned far more heavily on so-called house ads that promote Fox News programming and Fox Broadcasting Company scripted television shows," the Hollywood Reporter noted.
That means Carlson's roster of advertisers was already dangerously thin before we found out he used to go on the radio to defend a child-rapist and wonder aloud if Obama was really black.
[...]
On Monday night's program, Carlson's show featured just one national advertiser, Bayer. The rest of the spots on his show were filled with direct-marketing companies and in-house promos for Fox News.
It appears that Tuesday night’s advertisements weren’t any stronger.
Stay tuned … to anything but Fox News.
Wednesday, Mar 13, 2019 · 3:23:08 AM +00:00 · Jessica Sutherland
Conflicting reports abound, but Hannity appears to have misspoken.
The Wrap’s Jon Levine reports that Fox News says Carlson will be on all week ...
… while the Daily Beast’s Sam Stein reports that Carlson won’t be out until next week.
Hmmm.
Amid the vacation conversation, NowThis dropped an appalling compilation of even more Media Matters-unearthed Carlson comments on Tuesday night, this time centering around the Trump-owned Miss Teen USA pageant (and one contestant in particular).
NOTE: This is disgusting.
With the reduced ad revenue and string of scandals, what exactly will it take for Fox News to take action?