Tucker Carlson Is Daring Fox to Stop Him From Doing a Show on Twitter. Will the Network Bite?

Tucker Carlson began his comeback tour on Tuesday with a tweet proclaiming, “We’re back,” accompanied by a video, and a restyled website that showed him standing in the woods clutching a shotgun. The rollout achieved exactly what he wanted: lots of media buzz about his forthcoming Twitter show—The Wall Street Journal put the news on Wednesday’s front page—and loads of sign-ups for his mailing list.

But Carlson’s most interesting move on Tuesday was made out of public view, within an hour of his Twitter post, and delivered by his attorney Bryan Freedman. In a letter to Fox executives, Freedman accused the network of violating its contract with Carlson and signaled that Carlson may sue. Excerpts from the letter suggest it was designed to make Fox Corp. CEO and former Carlson pal Lachlan Murdoch wince.

On Monday, Carlson and Murdoch spoke for the first time since Carlson was terminated on April 24. (The New York Times was first to report on the call.) Murdoch has put himself through the wringer this spring: First, Fox reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems due to the network’s postelection smears, and then it fired Carlson, which may or may not have been related to the Dominion case. Carlson’s ouster dinged Fox’s stock, which has yet to recover, and the Dominion payout caused the company to post a loss when it reported earnings on Tuesday. Logically, the first questioner on Fox’s quarterly investor call invoked the former network host. So it was revealing that Murdoch—fresh off his call with Carlson—did not repeat the man’s name; he did not thank him for the years of profits or wish him well. “There’s no change to our programming strategy at Fox News,” Murdoch claimed, even though Carlson’s removal was a seismic change. Then he touted strong advertiser interest in prime time, a possibly veiled smack at Carlson, whose show on the network, Tucker Carlson Tonight, was radioactive in corporate America.

Murdoch’s “Tucker who?” act implied that Carlson was an artifact of the past. But the reality is, Carlson is going to shape Fox’s future—and vice versa. 

In the immediate aftermath of his dethronement, Carlson stayed almost completely mum. He posted a short video on Twitter—best understood as an initial shot across the bow at Fox—and chatted with paparazzi near his home in Florida, but that was it. He was uncharacteristically well behaved, even as the network’s ratings at 8 p.m. fell to pre-9/11 levels and several Fox wannabes capitalized on his fan base’s anger. Some of his friends urged him to go “nuclear,” as one put it, but he resisted temptation day after day.

Despite having his show canceled, Carlson has more than a year and a half remaining on his contract. He’s in a contractual position known as “pay or play,” meaning that Fox doesn’t have to “play” him by putting him on air, it just has to pay him until the last day of his contract. This provision sometimes means that TV stars have to sit on the bench for months or even years. But Carlson is not just any star; he became the biggest name on Fox News and sometimes seemed bigger than the network he was on. Carlson lorded over the Republican Party in ways that Sean Hannity would never dare. That’s who is in television’s equivalent of a rubber room right now. And he wants out—which explains Tuesday’s legal letter and Twitter announcement.

Freedman foreshadowed the legal maneuver over the weekend by telling Axios that “the idea that anyone is going to silence Tucker and prevent him from speaking to his audience is beyond preposterous.”

Since Carlson is technically still a Fox employee, the network can try to prevent him from speaking. Television hosts typically get permission from networks before going on podcasts, giving speeches, or generally speaking in public. Fox clearly doesn’t want to be in the Carlson business anymore, and there’s a world in which lawyers and agents discreetly draw up a termination agreement; Carlson could give up the money, Fox could give up its muzzle, and the two parties could go their separate ways. But this negotiation is complicated by the fact that Fox’s ratings have utterly collapsed in the wake of the canning. Carlson averaged about 3 million viewers at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. Half of them are now watching something else, or nothing at all, during that time slot. Fox must be afraid of Carlson taking his conspiracy-laden diatribes elsewhere, as he could become big competition for the network.

It’s already clear that Fox was ill-prepared for the Carlson aftermath. When I watched Lawrence Jones serve as guest host in the 8 p.m. time slot last week, I thought he was the worst thing you can possibly be on television: boring. By Friday, Jones’s fifth and final night hosting, the 8 p.m. viewership sank to 90,000 in the key demographic of 25-to-54-year-olds. Fridays tend to be a slow TV night, but on the first Friday in April, Carlson had averaged 287,000 viewers in that demographic. I was so astonished by the decline that I sought out historical data. Turns out that Friday night saw Fox’s weakest non-holiday performance in the time slot, amongst that same demographic, since June 2001, before the September 11 terrorist attacks turned Fox into a flag-cradling cable news juggernaut.

If Fox is slow-walking to keep Carlson off the air, ratings are the reason. Team Carlson definitely suspects as much. Last week, when I tweeted that “it’s fair to wonder if Fox wants to keep Carlson on the bench, and thus off any rival outlets, while it tries to rebuild its ratings by wooing Carlson’s ticked-off fans,” one of Carlson’s many allies saw it and texted me, “That’s exactly what they are doing.” Former Fox host Megyn Kelly, a longtime friend of Carlson’s, voiced it on Newsmax Monday night: “They have no intention of letting Tucker out of his contract.” She claimed the network wants him “silenced and sidelined.”