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Peter LaBarbera(WND)
Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly is accusing the network of engaging in an orchestrated “destruction campaign” against its ousted primetime star Tucker Carlson, but the campaign, working hand-in-hand with a Fox-hating leftist group, appears to be backfiring.
Carlson was suddenly let go by the network after his last Fox show, Friday, April 21, shocking the media industry and millions of Carlson’s conservative viewers and fans. His former show on Fox, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was by far the most successful political show on cable television.
Now, with Fox’s post-Tucker ratings still in the tank, relatively speaking (it is still beating MSNBC and CNN overall), a series of “leaks” – all designed to make him look bad – are surfacing and being circulated by the leftist, Tucker-despising group Media Matters For America (MMFA).
As the Hill reported Friday, the MMFA leaks show Carlson “making sexist and crude comments about women and complaining about the network on the set of his wildly popular show.” The series of leaked video snippets of Carlson “off air” before or during his show has been dubbed “FoxLeaks,” which can by viewed on MMFA senior fellow Matt Gertz’s author page.
“The orchestrated campaign to absolutely ruin Tucker Carlson continues,” Kelly said on her popular video podcast Tuesday. “This is a destruction campaign,” she said, alleging that Irena Briganti, Fox’s vice president of communications, is the source of the leaks. Unfortunately for Media Matters, Kelly and many others, including Newsmax late afternoon host Chris Salcedo below, say the leaks are only engendering more conservative sympathy for Tucker, and more animosity toward Fox.
Newsmax running Gaetz and Gertz reports back-to-back, what a time to be alive. pic.twitter.com/vziTYuwtVF
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) May 4, 2023
Media Matters, the self-styled “nation’s premier progressive media watchdog,” led by ex-conservative David Brock, is reviled by conservatives for routinely taking out-of-context and dishonest shots at conservative media leaders and networks. Ironically, Fox News has been its biggest target: the latest MMFA hit-job on a Fox star is its accusation that that former Trump spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany is a “racist” because she quipped on-air that New York City BLM-type protesters demanding “justice” over the death of subway choking victim Jordan Neely or else they would “burn it down,” – i.e., the city – had “rhythm.”
“It wasn’t enough to fire their number-one star, in my opinion,” Kelly continued, according to Newsmax. “Fox News seems absolutely determined to ruin him – to ruin his reputation, to make him unemployable and, ideally, in their view, to make his audience turn on him so that they won’t follow him wherever he goes next.”
The irony, she later told radio talker Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo, who agreed wholeheartedly, is that the Fox leaks are not hurting Carlson but helping him, because the former leading Fox hosts comes off the same off-air as on-air (albeit with cuss words).
Here is one of Gertz’s “FoxLeaks” designed, incredibly, to hurt the former Fox star: it shows him joking about “pillow fights” in the ladies restroom as female guests get their media make-up done:
FOXLEAKS: Tucker Carlson asks makeup artist if “pillow fights ever break out” in the women’s bathroom in new behind-the-scenes video https://t.co/M2d6THLRdq pic.twitter.com/vSRooVlzVH
— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) May 4, 2023
Fox News has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Media Matters to stop publishing the leaked Tucker videos, which the leftist group immediately rejected and ridiculed, saying Fox was trying to squelch MMFA’s free speech.
Newsmax, a conservative network that has benefited greatly from Fox’s odd decision to “de-platform” its own superstar, has been reporting frequently on the Tucker saga, as it sees its own ratings soar commensurately with Fox’s decline. Adweek reported Tuesday that “Newsmax posted a +77% gain in total primetime viewers (177,000 in April vs. 113,000 in March), with those gains driven by Carlson’s departure from Fox News.”
Newsmax eagerly reported how Kelly claims with great confidence to know who is leaking the Carlson videos to Media Matters: “And I know it’s Irena Briganti, who runs coms and [f*****g] hates Tucker. Sorry. She hates his guts. And it’s mutual. He doesn’t like her, either. None of us do. Nobody likes Irena,” Kelly said on her show Monday.
On another front, Kelly has coined “Foxweiser” as the term to symbolize Fox News executives’ stupidity in axing Carlson, by far their most successful host. The term alludes to Bud Light’s (Anheuser-Busch’s) now notorious marketing disaster picking Dylan Mulvaney, a transsexual TikTok star who sometimes plays a little girl on his videos, as a spokesman for Bud Light.
Kelly and Pags talk Tucker’s contract strategy
Interviewed Thursday by Pags, Kelly, whose show just passed one million subscribers on YouTube, said she enjoys being on her own, perhaps foreshadowing the path Carlson might take to be free of corporate control:
“Nobody can cancel me. I can be my real self,” Kelly said. “I’m so grateful not to have to answer to any of these absolute jerks who run these massive media companies anymore.”
She reiterated her previous assertion that Fox is holding Tucker hostage, as it were, by continuing to employ him even as they block him from appearing on air.
“Most of these contracts have no obligation to actually put you on the air. The standard Fox contract definitely does not have an obligation to put you on the air. None, nor does NBC,” she told Pags.
“They’ve got him right now … because they cancelled his show, they pulled him off the air, they continue to pay him. And so they either want him to breach [his contract] – they want to bait him into breaching, so that they don’t have to pay him the remainder of the money that’s owed. They can say: ‘You breached, bye!’” Kelly told Pags.
“And [Fox executives] still have the non-compete [clause] even if he breached. Or, they just want him to sit quietly for the next year and a half, stay off the playing field the next year and a half during these huge news events we’re going to have politically, and dampen his influence while they try to win back the viewers at 8:00 p.m.”
Pags responded: “It literally would take him out of the mix for the presidential election. Do you think that’s the reason?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s a big reason,” she answered.
Kelly in various interviews has suggested that should Carlson break his non-compete clause, Fox News will ultimately cave rather than fight him in court because: 1) it would risk further alienating them from millions of Tucker fans; and 2) their internal corporate communications could be exposed to the world.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Although millions of American parents send their precious children off to public school every day, imagining their kids’ days will be fi
