On Tuesday evening, it came out that Tucker’s legal team is now claiming that a Fox board member informed Tucker Carlson that he was taken off the air all of a sudden as part of Fox News’ settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.
Axios, in its report on the subject, claimed that Fox, in firing Tucker, “broke promises not to settle with Dominion Voting Systems ‘in a way which would indicate wrongdoing on the part of Carlson and not to take any actions in a settlement that would harm Carlson’s reputation.” The evidence for that promise being broken is the board member’s claim to Tucker that he was fired as part of the Dominion settlement.
Axios also noted that Tucker’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, fired off a letter to Fox officials in which he demanded Tucker be let out of his contract because high-ranking Fox employees, including “Rupert Murdoch himself,” broke promises they had made to Tucker Carlson “intentionally and with reckless disregard for the truth.”
The claim about the Dominion settlement being related to Tucker’s firing was contained in that same letter.
The news is important because Tucker will likely use the broken promise and outrage over his firing being part of a surrender to Dominion as he wages war on Fox News to get out of his contract and start his new media company, which he announced on Twitter today, saying:
“Hey, it’s Tucker Carlson, you often hear people say the news is full of lies. But most of the time, that’s not exactly right. Much of what you see on television or read the New York Times, is in fact true in the literal sense, it could pass one of the media’s own fact checks, lawyers would be willing to sign off on it. In fact, they may have. But that doesn’t make it true. It’s not true.
“At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie, a lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind. facts have been withheld on purpose, along with proportion and perspective, you are being manipulated. How does that work? Let’s see, if I tell you that a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery that is not strictly speaking a lie. He may have been framed at this point, there’s been no trial, so no one can really say.
“But if I don’t mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for the same crime six times before, am I really informing you? No, I’m not. I’m misleading you. And that’s what the news media are doing in every story that matters every day of the week, every week of the year. What’s it like to work in a system like that? After more than 30 years, in the middle of it, we could tell you stories, the best you could hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to tell the fullest truth that you can.
“But there are always limits. And you know that if you bump up against those limits, often enough, you will be fired for it. That’s not a guess. It’s guaranteed. Every person who works in English language media understands that the rule of what you can’t say defines everything. It’s filthy, really. And it’s utterly corrupting.
“You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true. Speech is the fundamental prerequisite for democracy. That’s why it’s enshrined in the first of our constitutional amendments. Amazingly, as of tonight, there aren’t many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world, the only one is Twitter, where we are now. Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops. Twitter is not a partisan site, everybody’s allowed here. And we think that’s a good thing.
“And yet, for the most part, the news that you see analyzed on Twitter comes from media organizations that are themselves thinly disguised propaganda outlets. You see it on cable news, you talk about it on Twitter. The result may feel like a debate, but actually the gatekeepers are still in charge. We think that’s a bad system. We know exactly how it works, and we’re sick of it.
“Starting soon, we’ll be bringing a new version of the show we’ve been doing for the last six and a half years to Twitter. We bring some other things to which we’ll tell you about. But for now, we’re just grateful to be here. Free speech is the main right that you have without it, you have no others. See you soon”
Watch him here:
We’re back. pic.twitter.com/sG5t9gr60O
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) May 9, 2023
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