Was Tucker Carlson fired over Ukraine?

  By Reginald Johnson

   Commentary

 

   There’s been a lot of opinions offered about what triggered the firing last month of top-rated cable TV host Tucker Carlson by FOX.

  Many speculated that the Murdoch family that owns FOX were angry over a number of things, including comments Carlson made about possible election fraud in the 2020 election, the sexual discrimination complaint against Carlson, and the talk show host’s controversial show questioning the official narrative concerning the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

 But few people have brought up the possibility that Carlson’s criticism of US involvement in Ukraine --- and specifically an editorial Carlson gave during his last broadcast on April 21 accusing the US of running bio warfare labs in Ukraine might have been his undoing.

  One person who has raised this, ironically, is an anchor with a Murdoch-owned operation in Australia, Sky News Australia.

  Andrew Bolt of Sky News said it was his “suspicion” that Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan Murdoch --- who he claimed fired Carlson --- was furious over Carlson’s claim that the United States was maintaining bio-labs “in a primitive country like Ukraine as well as sensitive nuclear technology.”

   Bolt commented “many of his viewers would’ve taken that to imply that the US is helping Ukraine with biological, secret biological, weapons research, even nuclear weapons.” Bolt said “that is crap, but it’s dangerous crap.”

  Bolt noted that Lachlan Murdoch had previously visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and had what he termed “warm conversations and that Murdoch had donated to a fund for journalists.”

  It also should be noted that Lachlan’s father Rupert also had visited visited with Zelensky and apparently was on good terms with the Ukrainian president.

  So it is quite possible that Zelensky put pressure on the Murdochs to do something about Tucker Carlson since Carlson was the only mainstream news commentator who has, since the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict with Russia, criticized the US support for the war.  He maintained that aid to Ukraine was not in America’s strategic interest and warned that continued aid might lead to a direct confrontation with Russia.

  Since he left FOX, Carlson has not spoken about the reasons for his firing. He is still under contract with FOX and the contractual terms likely prohibit him from making any comments.

 It is interesting to note that while many of Carlson’s shows are still available on the FOX News website the commentary Carlson gave on April 21 concerning the bio labs is gone. I have searched everywhere for it, including on You Tube, and I can't find it.

  It is also a troubling fact that the Murdochs apparently have this friendly relationship with the leader of a country that the United States is so deeply involved in, a nation which is at war with a nuclear armed power. That kind of cozy relationship certainly has to send a message to everybody in the FOX News organization that they better not be critical of Ukraine or the US aid for the war effort.

  We won’t know the real reasons for Carlson’s dismissal until the former talk show host is willing to go public and speak about it. It’s possible that could happen sooner rather than later because there are some rumors now that Carlson is talking about breaking his contract with FOX and starting some sort of independent media operation with mega-billionaire Elon Musk.

  One other interesting point is that since Carlson left any questioning of US support for Ukraine has been dropped at FOX.

   Like the other cable channels and news outlets, including newspapers like the New York Times, FOX reports the Ukraine War in a one-sided manner. Ukraine is portrayed as an innocent party in the war against Russia, a small country attacked by a brutal aggressor without any provocation. US aid is seen as vital and a “moral imperative.”

  But the media narrative leaves out the long lead-up to the war and the many provocations against Russia, including the US-instigated right-wing coup in Ukraine in 2014, leading to the establishment of a virulently anti-Russian regime in Kiev whose leaders included a number of neo-Nazis; the construction of many NATO bases in recent years close to Russia in Romania and Poland; the willful breaking of the Minsk peace agreement by the Ukrainian government, with the silent backing of the United States; the delivery of tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine by the US; and the massing of Ukrainian Army troops in eastern Ukraine just prior to the Russian invasion in February of last year.