While Carlson is out at Fox, the network's Islamophobia problem persists
Tucker Carlson, America’s most-watched cable news host, has been sacked from Fox News – but not for the reasons that many Muslim advocacy groups and organisations working on racial justice wanted him fired for.
Fox and Carlson have been accused of amplifying dangerous stereotypes, trafficking bigoted narratives, and manufacturing a particularly fearful image of Islam.
"Unless you see a significant change in how Fox talks about racial minorities and religious minorities, it is very difficult to give them credit for letting Tucker Carlson go," said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair).
Management at Fox News released a vague statement thanking him “for his service” and said that Tucker Carlson Tonight had aired its last show on 21 April. The lack of details led to speculation that the divorce was neither mutual nor amicable.
Less than a week before the Carlson announcement, Fox settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems to the tune of $787.5m, a case which revealed personal text messages from several Fox News staff. Many speculate that Carlson’s disparaging texts about Fox management helped lead to his exit.
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But much like the settlement reached between Fox and Dominion, the firing doesn’t mean accountability for those who have felt targeted by Fox News and Carlson’s show.
“My guess is that he wasn't let go of due to the content of his show, given he's spent years promoting dangerous and bigoted views without any pushback from Fox executives,” Mobashra Tazamal, from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, told Middle East Eye.
Carlson called Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys” in 2006 and argued that politicians should be more explicit about calling out “lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals”.
These are just two examples. Black Americans, immigrants and other minorities - whether categorised by race, religion, or sexual and gender identities - have taken issue with Carlson’s views, which aired to an average nightly viewership of 3.32 million people in 2022.
There’s already a list of “13 things Tucker Carlson said that DIDN’T get him fired” on Rolling Stone, and that list is by no means exhaustive.
But Carlson is not the first – Bill O’Reilly set the tone for the channel’s commentary – and won’t be the last firebrand host at Fox News.
“Fox is in the business of feeding fear and anxiety to the American public, and it has done this by constructing an enemy, often individuals from marginalised communities,” said Tazamal.
“While Carlson may be leaving, it surely doesn't mean that Fox will be re-examining the content it puts out, given there are still many other personalities on the network that promote harmful material to American audiences.”
No credit to Fox
Fox News currently runs a promo where the voice-over booms: “Fox is watching….and we have a mission to make a complicated world clear”. That tagline is a fair reflection of the "black and white" or "us versus them" world one academic says Fox constructs when covering Muslims.
“What Fox does is act as a collator – a clearinghouse of unrelated and often quite unremarkable developments that, taken together, create a clear ideological dialogue with its audience about how to relate to and interpret the Islamic world,” writes Fred Vultee, in an essay titled, JUMP BACK JACK, MOHAMMED'S HERE: Fox News and the Construction of Islamic Peril.
'Carlson is just one of the many who have built Fox into a megaphone for propaganda and hatred'
- Mobashra Tazamal, Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative
Vultee says that the network uses news practices that “allow Fox to construct an image of Islam as a distinct and persistent threat, framed in an ‘ideological square’: a matrix of group identity that highlights ‘their’ shortcomings and ‘our’ virtues.”
Carlson has hosted guests with anti-Muslim views such as Chadwick Moore, Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins, while earning praise from Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke.
“He welcomed some of the leading figures of the Islamophobia industry onto his show, where they were able to share their hateful views to millions of Americans. His comments played a role in the mainstreaming of Islamophobia,” Tazamal said, arguing that Carlson was a cheerleader for former President Donald Trump’s “xenophobic policies”.
“Carlson is just one of the many who have built Fox into a megaphone for propaganda and hatred.”
The numerous calls to hold him, or others, accountable in the past have been ignored by Fox News Media, which has built its brand on personalities like Carlson.
Cair's Edward Ahmed Mitchell told MEE that while his organisation called for Carlson to be fired years ago, the network shouldn't be praised for doing so now.
"We called on Fox News to fire him long ago because of him spreading white supremacist conspiracy theories and engaging in Islamophobia among other things, but it's hard to give Fox credit for firing him now," Mitchell said.
"And as far as I expect, Fox will continue to weaponise anti-Muslim bigotry to attract viewers."
Tazamal of the Bridge Initiative says that neither the network nor its advertisers have ever seen the divisive views as a problem.
“The network allowed Carlson to share misinformation, hateful propaganda, and racist content to millions of Americans, never seeing it as a problem. This demonstrates that Fox found Carlson's harmful and dangerous views perfectly acceptable,” Tazamal said.
Mainstreaming bigotry
Tucker has been praised for his willingness to challenge mainstream media narratives, but at the same time has been criticised for mainstreaming fringe narratives.
Carlson’s criticism of mainstream narratives often came to conspiratorial conclusions. He famously opposed mainstream media coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic and called the subsequent vaccination drive “the single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history”.
When it came to politicians, Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was a target of Carlson’s in the past, with the host saying she is “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country”.
Omar is regularly targeted with racist hate mail and death threats, but Carlson’s targeting repeated a conspiracy that has been credited with leading to actual violence, like in the case of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attack.
Tucker Carlson will be losing his platform at the largest cable news network, and many have been arguing that the network needs him more than he needs the network.
His audience is large, loyal, and will likely follow him, whether he appears independently or with another network in the future.
Mitchell noted that Carlson's departure should not be seen by the American public as an attempt to "silence" or "censor" him.
"There's nothing wrong with expressing a very conservative or very liberal viewpoint in mainstream media. It's good to have a diversity of perspectives and opinions, and it's good for people to question the status quo," he said.
"That's not the same thing as spreading lies and embracing racism. There shouldn't be any of this kind of grievance culture and narratives that they're trying to silence him.
"Tucker Carlson went way beyond anything you could call mainstream conservativism in his commentary on racial issues, not to mention the stuff that he said about religious minorities."
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