Tucker Carlson Says Show Is Being Targeted for Cancelation

Fox News host Tucker Carlson speaks in Washington on March 29, 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said on the Thursday night episode of his program that his show has been targeted for cancellation.

Carlson said that “in the last several weeks, and particularly in the last 24 hours, the call to take this show off the air by groups funded—for real—by the Ford Foundation, or by George Soros, by Michael Bloomberg, by Jeff Bezos, has become deafening, going after our advertisers, going after the companies that carry our signal into your home.”

What’s more, he added, there has been a “cowardice and complicity” on behalf of the “entire media class in all of this,” suggesting that eventually, reporters at legacy news outlets will be targeted as well.

Writing for Fox News’ website, Carlson added that it may be part of a larger campaign to silence Fox News and other media, noting that some legacy news outlets have dedicated resources calling for the channel to be taken down. One columnist for The New York Times, he added, “has written three separate columns demanding that someone yank this news channel off the air immediately” and on Wednesday, “suggested that ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ was somehow guilty of terrorism and violence, something that we’ve opposed consistently for four years.”

“Fox is the last big organization in the American news media that differs in even the smallest ways from the other big news organizations. At this point, everyone else in the media is standing in crisp formation, in their starched matching uniforms and their little caps, patiently awaiting orders from the billionaire class. And then there’s Fox News off by itself, occasionally saying things that are slightly different from everyone else,” Carlson wrote.

He added: “These are craven servants of the Democratic Party. They are feline, not canine. All of their aggression is passive aggression.”

But over the past several weeks, there has been growing pushback against corporate media for their attempts to call for the cancelation of other media outlets and journalists.

Former New York Times investigative reporter and Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald described the phenomena this week in his article: “Teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets ... devote the bulk of their ‘journalism’ to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention).”

The attempts to silence others is “now the prevailing ethos in corporate journalism,” he said, adding that such organizations have no desire to take on “real power centers” such as the “military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, [and] Silicon Valley monopolies.”