Tucker Carlson already has a new destination: Twitter. The star host of Fox News, fired a few weeks ago after the out-of-court agreement of the network with Dominion to avoid a defamation lawsuit, has announced with a three-minute video on the social network that he will soon launch there a version of the program he had been doing on the news channel.
In his speech, he attacks traditional media and defends the value of the social network. According to the presenter, the traditional media confuse "in every important news every day of the week, every week of the year."
The host seems to want to present his firing by Fox as a form of censorship: "The best thing you can hope for in the news business right now is the freedom to tell as much truth as you can. But there are always limits. And you know that if you hit those boundaries often enough, you'll get fired for it. It's not an assumption, it's guaranteed. Everyone who works in English-language media understands that the rule of what cannot be said defines everything. It's disgusting, really, and it's totally corrupting," he continues.
We're back. pic.twitter.com/sG5t9gr60O
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 9, 2023
Carlson was one of the presenters who aired the hoax of electoral rigging in the 2020 presidential elections. The intercepted internal messages and communications show that Fox anchors and executives did not believe the lie they were giving wings to. Fox News reached an agreement to compensate Dominion with 787.5 million dollars (about 720 million euros at the current exchange rate) and avoid trial in the defamation lawsuit filed by the company, which was accused on the air of electoral manipulation.
This same Tuesday, when asked about the dismissal of Carlson, the president and director of Fox Media, Lachlan Murdoch, son of the tycoon Rupert Murdoch, has referred to the departure of the presenter as another adjustment of the programming and the agreement with Dominion as a business decision.
Despite his reputation as a manipulator, Carlson presents himself in his Twitter video as a champion of free speech: "You can't have a free society if people aren't allowed to say what they believe to be true. Freedom of expression is the fundamental requirement of democracy. That's why it's enshrined in the first of our constitutional amendments," he says.
The Wall Street Journal, also controlled by Rupert Murdoch, reported that Tucker Carlson had a salary of $ 20 million a year at Fox News. According to Axios, the presenter has accused the chain of fraud and breach of contract after his dismissal through a letter that seems the prelude to legal action. The presenter's contract lasts until January 2025 and the intention of the chain was to continue paying his salary to prevent him from signing for another channel.
According to Carlson, there aren't many platforms left that allow free speech. "The last big one left in the world, the only one, is Twitter, where we are now. Twitter has long been the place where our national conversation is incubated and developed. Twitter is not a partisan site, everyone is allowed to be here, and we think that's a good thing. However, most of the news that is analyzed on Twitter comes from media outlets that are themselves barely disguised propaganda media. You see it on cable news, you talk about it on Twitter. The outcome may seem like a good debate, but in reality the guardians are still in charge. We think it's a bad system. We know exactly how it works and we're sick of it. Very soon we will bring to Twitter a new version of the program that we have been doing for the last six and a half years," he continues.
And he concludes: "We also bring other things, which we will tell you. But for now, we're just grateful to be here. Freedom of expression is the main right you have. Without her, you have no others."
In its first hour after being published, Carlson's tweet accumulated 6.1 million views and the video 1.8 million. The new owner of the platform, Elon Musk, wants Twitter to incorporate more content creators and has been willing to reward them or allow them to incorporate a payment system. Since the takeover by the tycoon, the network has become a chaotic medium where misinformation and hate messages have proliferated. Carlson makes no allusion to it in his video.
Musk had not reacted to Carlson's tweet at the time and was entangled in airing a theory that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, manipulated the 2020 election result.