Murdoch’s SkyNews Australia: Tucker Carlson Thought He Was Bigger Than Fox

Tucker Carlson was “sacked essentially for thinking that he was bigger than Fox News,” and the decision to drop him was made by Lachlan Murdoch, not his father Rupert Murdoch alone, as some media reports have indicated, according to Andrew Bolt, one of the biggest stars on News Corp-owned Sky News Australia.

“The message is now out,” Bolt said during his program Tuesday. “If you threaten your station or your newspaper by going a bit nuts, you know, saying all sorts of wild things that maybe you know are false or maybe you haven’t even bothered to check enough, it doesn’t matter how big you are you are never bigger than the media organization that actually made you.”

The Murdoch family took full control of Sky News Australia in 2016 through the local arm of News Corp. Rupert Murdoch is the chairman of the Fox Corporation, owner of Fox News, and the executive chairman of News Corp. His son, Lachlan, is the executive chair and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation and oversees the company’s portfolio of news, sports, and entertainment assets.

“Fox News is part of the Murdoch media Empire that includes Sky News,” Bolt said. “Tucker was actually sacked and some outlets have reported just before I went to air, he was sacked by Lachlan Murdoch, the day-to-day boss of News Corp.”

Fox News has lost other “giants” before, said Bolt, including Roger Ailes, Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly, and Bill O’Reilly, and “it’s only gotten stronger,” but still, “maybe now some other hosts and not just Fox News will realize it is Lachlan Murdoch who runs the business and it’s not them.”

Bolt also noted the $787.5 million Dominion lawsuit settlement, which happened “because some Fox News hosts have gone nuts pushing the fake news that Donald Trump was beaten at the last election by voting machines that are somehow been rigged,” but said that Carlson “did not push that lie like some other people” at Fox News.

“He was skeptical, but the court battle with Dominion company that made these voting machines revealed that he did know those machines, they weren’t rigged [and] the lie was a lie, yet he still told another host that her producer should be fired for saying so,” said Bolt.

Carlson, though, is also being sued by a producer “claiming he had a misogynist workplace,” said Bolt, adding that there have been emails surfacing that the now-former host had referred to a woman by using an obscene term.

However, he said his “suspicion” is that it was Carlson’s final editorial Friday night that led Lachlan Murdoch to fire him.

“Maybe I’m imagining that bit because of course the Murdochs are famous for allowing people like me to have their own opinions,” Bolt acknowledged.

However, he said that Carlson was “pushing dangerous and plainly false conspiracy theories” that painted Ukraine as “hopelessly corrupt and the Biden team as liars for supporting it.”

Such “propaganda” was “gold to Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin,” said Bolt. “Of course, Carlson’s claims were repeated endlessly in Russian TV to justify Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

Last Friday, Carlson claimed that the United States was maintaining “secret biolabs” in a “primitive country like Ukraine” as well as “sensitive nuclear technology,” said Bolt.

“Many of his viewers would have taken that to imply that the U.S is helping Ukraine with biological, secret biological, weapons research, even nuclear weapons,” said Bolt. “That is crap, but it’s dangerous crap.”

He added that Lachlan Murdoch and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “have had a warm conversation” and that Murdoch donated to a fund for journalists.

“You might say why wasn’t tough action taken earlier to make all the Fox News hosts sing from the same song sheet?” said Bolt. “The Murdoch media has always had one supreme virtue that has made me such a fan … hosts and journalists get a lot of freedom to say what they think.”

But that backfired on Carlson because he tried to be bigger than Fox News itself, Bolt concluded.