Tucker Carlson, the star Fox News anchor, was abruptly fired after six years of invigorating American political discourse.

Dry and unexpected, the news fell in the form of a press release. On Monday April 24, the conservative channel Fox News announced that it was parting ways with its star anchor, Tucker Carlson. The decision comes a week after the chain agreed to pay a monumental $787.5 million (€713 million) to electronic voting machine maker Dominion to avoid a defamation lawsuit. As part of this process, several private messages from Tucker Carlson were revealed, some of which were highly critical of the channel’s management and its owner, Rupert Murdoch.

Almost eighteen months before the US presidential election, the 53-year-old anchor’s exit is a major event in both media and politics. His daily show was the most watched on news channels, averaging 3.2 million viewers. But this number says nothing about the viral videos on social networks, the segments posted on countless sites. Tucker Carlson is one of the most influential ideologues of the American right. For elected Republicans, channeling its antennae is a form of dubbing.

“We’ll be back on Monday.”, an amused Tucker Carlson said Friday evening, at the end of his show, as if nothing had happened. The “Agreement” Chained in its press release resembles a severance above all else. The anchor’s last image on Fox News will be of him eating a pineapple and sausage pizza with the delivery man who let police arrest a suspect in a small town in Pennsylvania days earlier.

In April 2017, Tucker Carlson took over from Bill O’Reilly in the prime-time 8 p.m. The latter, Antenna’s senior and influential populist voice, had to leave the channel abruptly due to allegations of sexual harassment. An internal investigation and disaffiliation of promoters prompted the management to take a radical decision, expressing its desire to open a new era.

A television show with strong performance

Tucker Carlson came from the opposite side. He appeared on the CNN news channel and later on MSNBC, where he hosted a political program between 2005 and 2008. At Fox News, he had to find a way to stand out. The other star of the evening, Sean Hannity, whispered in Donald Trump’s ear and then sang his praises, no holds barred, at the White House. Tucker Carlson, who chooses his path: Trumpism without Trump. A sense of the enormous potential that this MAGA base (“Make America Great Again”) represents, Americans of diverse profiles, often feeling disenfranchised and forgotten, have God in their mouths and weapons in their hands. .

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