Fox news

Tucker Carlson is a master contortionist. As conservative strategist David Reaboi reminded us this week, one of the most egregious examples of Carlson’s tendency for reality deformation came in the form of an interview with Kanye West, the troubled rapper who sat for an interview on Carlson’s erstwhile Fox News show a couple of years ago. It was the middle of West’s antisemitic meltdown, but because West was embracing Donald Trump, Carlson presented him as a sensible, even brilliant thinker. “Is West crazy?” Carlson asked at the top of the interview, before concluding at the end: “Not crazy. Worth listening to, even if you disagree with him.

Fox News has announced its new primetime lineup post-Tucker Carlson: Jesse Watters will take over the coveted 8 p.m. ET slot vacated by Tucker, while Laura Ingraham is moving from 10 p.m. to the 7 p.m. hour. Sean Hannity will stay in his spot at 9 p.m., and Greg Gutfeld is slotted forward an hour to 10 p.m. The shuffle is an attempt by executives to resuscitate the network after the unceremonious firing of its top host, Tucker Carlson, which led several loyal viewers to jump ship.

No doubt Rupert Murdoch breathed a sigh of relief when Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to launch his presidential campaign on Twitter proved disastrous. The announcement, hosted by Elon Musk, was derailed by technical glitches, leading to twenty minutes of awkward silences interrupted by occasional hot-mic moments of frustration. Even after Musk and his team at Twitter got things going, the highly anticipated event drew a meager audience of just 300,000 live listeners. The second stop of the DeSantis campaign, immediately afterward, was at Fox News, for an interview watched by an average of 2 million viewers.

Murdoch gets what Murdoch wants — and this time, it’s to erase any evidence that Tucker Carlson ever existed. The media mogul is so insistent that the “T”-word remain unspoken that he has purportedly banned any mention of the ex-host across the Fox networks.  This is bad news for Chadwick Moore, author and contributing editor at The Spectator after he announced his new book, Tucker, that comes out next month. Moore tweeted that he’d been blacklisted from the network after announcing the book, saying: “I’m not allowed on Fox anymore, because I wrote a book about @TuckerCarlson. I’ve been banned from the network.

Elon Musk has decided it's too much work for him to be the chief executive of Twitter, a fraying social network, in addition to running Tesla and SpaceX and a potpourri of other startups. He recently named Linda Yaccarino, an NBC ad executive, as the new CEO so that she could focus on business operations and he could focus on product design and new technologies. As an employee of Musk's, Yaccarino has an impossible mission — to stem the bleeding, appease the advertisers, and, of course, keep her new boss happy. Good luck to her, I say, for Twitter's current fortunes are going in only one direction — south. When Musk acquired Twitter, he paid $44 billion for a company that no one else wanted nearly as much. Since then, its value has fallen to almost $20 billion.

After what could only be described as a dizzying month in news media, Fox is on the hunt for a Tucker Carlson replacement. Cockburn has some thoughts — and suggestions — on who might be a good fit for the network’s coveted 8 p.m. slot. First, there are obvious candidates within Fox already. Jesse Watters currently hosts Jesse Watters Primetime in the 7 p.m. time slot. Bumping Watters up an hour is thought to be the preferred and likeliest solution within the network. Greg Gutfeld is a close second, having hosted late-night shows from 2007 to the present, with the current Gutfeld! earning impressive viewership numbers. On the more conventional side, there is Brian Kilmeade, who hosts both the weekday Fox & Friends and Saturday’s One Nation with Brian Kilmeade.